UZBEKISTAN: As the door to his prison cell was battered open on Friday night, Odil Maksataliev said, he jumped back in surprise. Eight armed men burst in.
Maksataliev had never seen them before, but they seemed to recognise him immediately. "We know that you are one of the businessmen who was put here for no reason, and we've come to set you free," he recalled one announcing.
Then they hustled him outside into the early-morning darkness, running past the bloodied bodies of two prison guards who lay still on the ground. A fleet of cars was waiting.
So went a jailbreak in the city of Andijan, touching off uprisings in several other cities in Uzbekistan. The gunmen freed 23 local businessmen accused of forming a terrorist cell, along with about 2,000 other inmates.
Within hours, the businessmen were featured guests on the speaker's platform at an unprecedented demonstration against Uzbek president Islam Karimov's autocratic rule in the city's central square. But the rally ended in a bloodbath when Uzbek security forces directed a barrage of gunfire at the protesters.
On Wednesday Maksataliev stood in a tent encampment on a grassy hillside near the city of Suzak in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan with several fellow businessmen and about 500 other people who had fled Uzbekistan.
Wearing a dusty tracksuit and clutching a small sheet of paper documenting his application for political asylum in Kyrgyzstan, Maksataliev seemed indistinguishable from the other bedraggled escapees.
But his story addresses the continuing controversy over who is behind the revolt in the mostly Muslim country.
President Karimov has claimed that the businessmen, the men who freed them and most of the protesters were violent Islamic radicals who want to turn the country into an extremist theocracy.
Restriction of worship is a common complaint in the country. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan group created by Congress, this month reported "severe violations of religious freedom" in the country.
But Maksataliev and others in the camp said he and his 22 fellow defendants had little interest in religion or politics. By their account, they were simply successful businessmen, targeted by a paranoid government that perceived anyone with prestige as a threat. Most people in the square were peaceful, ordinary citizens, the men said.
"They were not terrorists," said Mr Maksataliev (45). "They were just people who had had enough."
Mr Maksataliev is a burly man with the look of a boxer. But when he spoke about the ironworks factory he founded five years ago, his voice thickened with the emotion of one speaking of a lost child.
"We employed 54 workers," he said wistfully. "It was really professional. They were all given uniforms, a free lunch and money for transportation."
In 2003, his company and those belonging to many of the other 22 businessmen took top honours at an exposition showcasing businesses in Andijan. "Maybe Karimov was afraid of us because we were growing stronger and we all knew each other and were helping each other like a network," he said.
Sometimes, Mr Maksataliev added, he did think about the need for more democracy but he said he was far too busy building his business to act on such ideas. So he was completely shocked, he said, when one morning last June, Uzbek officials packed in two cars forced him off the road on his way to work and bundled him off to the city's interrogation centre.
He was kept there without being charged for more than a month, he said.
Then he was transferred to a 6ft x 13ft cell in Andijan's main prison and held there with five other inmates. One was a thief, he said, another a drug dealer.
Human rights groups allege that the Uzbek government has engaged in extreme forms of torture and executions such as boiling prisoners alive. Mr Maksataliev said he was not physically mistreated and his family was allowed to visit him frequently. But he said he suffered the mental torture of watching his business collapse as Uzbek authorities spent seven months combing his records for evidence of malfeasance.
Meanwhile, authorities were arresting more and more prominent businessmen.
Then one day Mr Maksataliev was informed that he was being charged with forming an Islamic terrorist network with the other 22 businessmen, and of being a follower of Akram Yuldashev, an Uzbek writer imprisoned by the government in 1999. "I had never even heard of Akram," he said.
Mr Maksataliev said he is a not especially observant Muslim. "I don't even pray five times a day," he noted. "I employed lots of non-Muslim Russians in my company, many of whom drank alcohol. Would I have done that if I were a fundamentalist?"
The trial lasted three months and had a farcical quality, he said. Scores of witnesses were brought in and asked whether Mr Maksataliev was a terrorist. Only two answered Yes; one was mentally unstable, the other was a disgruntled former employee.
The prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Mr Maksataliev to three years in prison. The judge's decision was still pending when the men sprung him from jail.
Once on the street, he agreed to go to the demonstration out of gratitude to his rescuers and in hopes that Mr Karimov would come, listen to the crowd's concern and accept the freeing of the prisoners.
He saw his family briefly at the demonstration, but told them to go home when the shooting broke out.
Now he worries he was wrong. "I am here, but they are surely being followed by the government. The government could even kill them."