In her statement, Mutabar Tajibayeva, 45, thanked all journalists, human rights activists, supporters, diplomats and politicians in Uzbekistan and beyond for assistance and support.

Mutabar also thanked the Martin Ennals Foundation which awarded her its human rights prize in May 2008.

She said in her statement that she had been sentenced to eight years in prison on trumped-up charges for her journalistic and human rights activities and for condemning the Andijan massacre in 2005.

“I have witnessed that Uzbek jails are not corrective establishments but places of the systematic use of physical, moral and psychological torture and humiliation of human dignity of prisoners,” she said.

She said that despite the rule that prisoners should not be held in a solitary punishment cell for more than two weeks a year, she had been held there for 112 days out of her 970 days of imprisonment on top of 30 days of forced treatment in the prison’s psychiatric hospital.

“However, no torture or mistreatment helped monsters to break me down. I did not admit none of the charges brought against me and I did not sign any appeal to the dictator in my right mind, not even under a threat of being killed,” Mutabar wrote in her statement.

“And, despite being extremely weak physically, I defeated the monsters,” she said.

She said that she had managed this only thanks to moral support shown to her by local and international public and thanked them.

Mutabar noted that she would start a campaign to achieve the release of all political and religious prisoners in the country, including writer Mamadali Mahmudov, former MP Murad Jurayev, businessman Ishak Abdullayev, who will soon turn 75, and human rights activists Azamjon Farmanov, Alisher Karamatov, Abdurasul Hudoynazarov and others.

She said that when she was released she was shocked to learn about the imprisonment of writer Juma Yusuf who had been waging unequal fight against Islam Karimov’s tyranny for many years.

“Inmates of Uzbek prisons are captives of an island of torture. They are deprived of not only freedom but also all human rights and liberties. As a former captive of the ‘island of torture’ who faced all problems of the system, I believe it is my duty to devote myself to protecting the rights of prisoners,” Mutabar said in her statement.