AKIPRESS.COM - The Uzbek President’s eldest daughter has managed to get an audiotape to the BBC where she says that she and her daughter are being treated worse than dogs and that they require medical attention, UzNews reported at the weekend.

The BBC thus published an audio recording in which 42-year-old Gulnara Karimova talks about the conditions surrounding her house arrest over the past six months with her 15-year-old daughter Iman.

“No one has given us a clear answer why we are being held at home like we were in prison. Why is my daughter cut off from communication when every 16-year-old should have an opportunity to go to school, to communicate with friends. I am not talking about me now. We need medical help,” Karimova said in English.

“We are held inside, we are not allowed to make a single step outside,” says the second part of her smuggled recording. “We are being treated worse than dogs. They tried breaking my fingers, exerted psychological pressure, our house is completed surrounded.”

In addition to the audio recording the BBC has also obtained a video likely made in winter when Gulnara Karimova and her children – Islam and Iman – tried to gain access to her father at his residence.

A group of men in military clothes with weapons physically block Gulnara while she comments with a quivering voice, “See what they are doing.”

A young male voice, most likely Islam, says “Turn the camera on, Iman.”

When the men start physically to push and shove her, she screams, “Father! Father!” and a bit later, “I understand. Let me go.” The recording ends with a helpless, “I will see him!”

Once the second most influential person in the country after her father Gulnara has experienced a meteoric fall from grace which has ended in house arrest.

In February of this year, a special forces unit stormed her apartment in Tashkent and arrested her nearest associates including a one-and-half-month-old child present on the premises. Karimova and her daughter were placed under house arrest.

In July, the prosecutor general’s office released a statement stating that Karimova’s closest associates – her boyfriend Rustam Madumarov and her friend and business parter Gayane Avakyan – had both been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.