When the guards came to release Adem Boukadida with 20 other men from the white-walled compound of Tunisia's Mornghouia prison, just outside the capital, Tunis, they told him: "Go and get your stuff." That's all.

The 30-year-old graduate of Al-Azhar University, which the old regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali regarded with suspicion for its Islamist links, could barely walk.

The stories of men like Boukadida, finally released last Thursday, fuel the continuing anger against those in the interim government who were closely associated with the Ben Ali regime. The stories are of brutality, corruption and everyday cruelty at the hands of his police state. These accounts are at last emerging uncensored on television and radio and in the press.

Boukadida, a short, stocky man with a full beard, was trying to escape arrest when pushed from a second-floor window by police in his home town of Sousse in November. "Two policemen had been shot in my neighbourhood, so they rounded up all of the young men," he explained after his release. "I had been in prison before for 11 months in 2007. I'd been a student in Egypt and returned to Tunisia. They said I had been inciting people to go to Iraq to join the resistance."

It is a charge he denies, but it laid him open to the attentions of a regime that specialised in arbitrary violence. "I did not want to be caught again because I knew what would happen. So I fled."

The police caught up with him. On 16 November, four carloads of them arrived at his parents' house while they were celebrating Eid and chased him up the stairs. Boukadida tried to escape out of a window to where he could reach a nearby balcony. A policeman pushed him from behind as he tried to escape. He fell 10 metres to the ground. He unravels bandages to show his injuries. On his right wrist there is a still fresh scar from where a bone broke through the skin. There is another scar below one knee and a deep gash above one eye that has healed into a livid scar.

He was released from hospital on 8 January into the hands of the feared Sûreté d'Etat — Tunisia's security police. During his interrogation, his sternum was cracked with a baton and with fists.

Boukadida knows the name of the man who pushed him out of the window: Khalid. And the name of the officer who beat him too: Ridal Djamal.

Reading his file, it seems impossible that Boukadida, a clothes seller, could have committed the acts of which he was accused. It was alleged he organised a terrorist cell with others in Sousse to make bomb attacks, but at the time of the supposed offences he was in a hospital bed in Sahloul, as a result of his fall. The witness testimony against him was a crude fabrication.

Battered and bruised, Boukadida signed a confession, although he could not write, marking it with his thumb-print. But the police had not counted on his lawyer, who secured a statement from the hospital stating where Boukadida was – and the condition he was in – during the time he was supposed to be plotting his acts of terrorism.

Still he was not released. "They kept me in a cell. A large room with almost 60 other people. I needed to clean my wounds, but I could not. The toilet was a hole in the floor. I asked for a proper toilet because …" he indicates the injury to his leg means he cannot bend down.

Then came the Jasmine Revolution. Inside the prison no one told the inmates what was happening outside. "We could hear the shooting but we didn't know about the flight of Ben Ali." Sometimes, he says, they could smell teargas. Finally a guard told the men what had happened: the president had gone.

Boukadida says some inmates cried and some applauded, some sang, and some danced. "It was the end of the dictatorship. I would have danced too, if I could," he recalls.

But now there was almost no food. The guards brought the prisoners bread twice a day. And in an act of spite over the regime's collapse, Boukadida says, men were taken to the prison's central courtyard to be beaten.

Tunisia's new government has said it will pay compensation to prisoners who suffered under the 23-year regime of Ben Ali. But Boukadida is anxious that those who tortured him should be brought to account, which he believes will happen.

"I'm sure those who did this to me will be brought to justice and made to account for their criminal acts."

After days of demonstrations demanding the cleansing of the new government of those ministers associated with Ben Ali, on Friday the interim prime minister appeared to pledge that he would quit politics after elections in the near future. Mohamed Ghannouchi said: "My role is to bring my country out of this temporary phase and even if I am nominated I will refuse it and leave politics."