SOCIALIST Party of the Oppressed (ESP) activist Gokhan Gunes was tortured and threatened with rape during a sickening five-day ordeal after being kidnapped by Turkish police, he said today.

Mr Gunes told a press conference of his treatment, which included being stripped naked, electrocuted and dunked in freezing cold water while blindfolded.

“I could not move my hands. I was kept blindfolded for hours. During my stay, I was constantly threatened and they tried to force me to be a spy. I was threatened with rape as well,” he said at the Istanbul branch of the Human Rights Association.

The construction worker was finally freed at 6am, when he was dumped blindfolded at the spot where he was kidnapped last Wednesday.

He explained how he was tasered by his kidnappers, believed to be police officers, who bundled him into a vehicle and put a sack over his head before driving him to an unknown location.

During his torture, his captors said: “We are the invisible.”

Mr Gunes described being held in a coffin-like box that they called “the grave.” The building he was held in was “a torture centre,” he said, where he was alternately dazzled by lights and then kept in darkness, so unable to see his kidnappers.

This morning, he was taken blindfolded in a car with four people, with one known as “the chief” taking his mobile phone SIM card before abandoning him. 

“These attacks against socialists have been carried out many times before,” Mr Gunes said, warning that the 1990s policy of forced disappearances has returned.

“But this struggle is a social struggle outside of individual struggle. Those who want to cry out for the voices of the oppressed, those who want to build solidarity with the oppressed, those who try to silence those who want to be a scream for the problems of the oppressed know very well that they cannot achieve this,” he insisted.

His mother, Nefize Gunes, thanked all of those who had supported the campaign to locate her son and said that she hoped all those missing would be found soon.

ESP co-chair Sahin Tumuklu said: “We are faced with a strategy of forced confessions and spying on one side and threats and blackmail on the other,” calling for increased solidarity against these practices.