Cairo - Three men detained over deadly protests at Egypt's biggest textile plant over price hikes and pay demands have been released after weeks of "torture", one of the workers said on Monday.
"We were subjected to electric shocks, to beatings and there was no food and or drink for the first few days," blogger Karim el-Beheiri said a day after his release.
"We went through weeks of torture and humiliation."
Beheiri, Tarek Amin and Kamal al-Fayoumy were arrested on April 6 at the Misr Spinning and Weaving company in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla after riots which left three people dead and hundreds detained.
They were accused of "inciting unrest, damage to property and demonstrating", a security official said.
The three were fired from their jobs after their arrest, said Beheiri, whose detention was condemned by international rights groups.
"Many of us had never seen the inside of a prison before," Beheiri said, describing his first weeks at Borg al-Arab prison near the Mediterranean city of Alexandria sharing a small cell with 25 people as "terrifying."
"We had bread thrown at us. They would dip their hands in our food before throwing it at us," said Beheiri who, with the others, staged two hunger strikes while in detention.
On April 16, the prosecution ordered the release of several detainees including Beheiri, Fayoumy and Amin, but the three remained behind bars until Sunday.
Beheiri said that during interrogations at state security headquarters in various Egyptian cities, questioning focused mainly on his blog and his connections to other bloggers.
"It's the new fashion," he said of a large-scale crackdown against Egypt's cyber dissidents.
In recent months Egypt has seen a number of strikes and protests against low salaries and price rises that have been one of the most serious challenges to the regime of veteran President Hosni Mubarak.