Two men who escaped one of the world's most secretive and repressive states have told AFP how they were tortured, beaten and raped in Turkmenistan for the "crime" of being gay.

When the oil- and gas-rich Central Asian republic makes the headlines, it is usually for the eccentricities of its "National Leader" and "Hero Protector" Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov.

The dentist-turned-autocrat who writes poems about his horse -- and whose football team has never lost a game in the local league -- is a health freak. So much so that his son Serdar, the president, plans to "eradicate smoking" there by the end of the year.

But behind the monumental statues and the marble city of Arkadag built in Berdymukhamedov's honour, opponents and minorities are mercilessly persecuted, say Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, none more so than LGBTQ people, who are often jailed or sent to psychiatric hospitals.

Arslan, who is now in hiding abroad, told AFP how he was raped five times in jail -- where HIV-positive prisoners are condemned to a slow death from lack of treatment -- while David was beaten and raped by his torturers, who wore gloves "to avoid touching my blood".

Their rare testimonies, supported by official documents and confirmed by NGOs, reveal a hidden side of the reclusive regime, which tolerates no independent media or rights groups.

The authorities refuse to comment on all such allegations. But last year at the UN they insisted that "all discrimination" was illegal in Turkmenistan.

Homosexual relations are a crime, they said, because they run counter to the "traditional values" of the Turkmen people.

Arslan -- whose name AFP has been changed to protect him -- grew up in poverty in the second largest city of Turkmenabat, near the Uzbek border. "We had neither bread nor basic clothes," said the 29-year-old, who comes from the Uzbek minority.

When he moved to the capital Ashgabat at 18, he was taken aback by the pomp of the white marble edifices built by the country's first post-Soviet president Saparmurat Niyazov and........

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