Men and women in tears have flocked to the hospital mortuary in Damascus to look for their missing family members who vanished under Bashar al-Assad's violent rule.

Rescuers searching for secret prison cells discovered dozens of mutilated, decaying bodies inside Sednaya, Assad's most infamous prison, which was freed by Syrian rebels when his regime fell on Sunday.

Reports of underground cells beneath the prison, which Amnesty International had referred to as a "human abattoir," soon surfaced after the rebels captured Damascus. There were none discovered.

Instead, thousands of citizens were tortured and died within the compound using torture equipment including red ropes and body-crushing iron crushers.

Some 35 bodies that had been visibly tortured were discovered in the search for missing prisoners, according to Ahmad Shouman, a local official.

“They’re disfigured, cut up. We can’t tell who is who,” he said from the Damascus morgue, which has been affected by power outages because of fighting in the capital.

Mr Shouman was surrounded by distraught Syrians who had witnessed the brutality of Assad’s regime first hand.

“Look, his right hand is gone!” one man shouted as he searched inside a body bag. Another asked: “What did all these people do wrong to die?”

Rima al-Turk, a Syrian woman, entered the morgue looking for her brother, who she said was taken by the regime’s intelligence agency from outside their family home “with no charges against him” in 2013.

“We didn’t find [his body],” she said, although it was difficult to determine the identity of some because of how intensely they had been tortured.

Zaher al-Taqesh, a mortician, said several of the bodies were recognisable by “distinguishing features”, such as a tattoo or a wound, and others could only be identified by their teeth.

The Damascus hospital morgue was one of multiple locations in the Syrian capital hosting bodies found after the fall of Assad’s regime.

Bodies showing signs of torture were also housed at the Harasta Hospital, a member of the emergency response team associated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which seized power from Assad, told Reuters.