Syrian rebel fighters say they have found around 40 bodies showing signs of torture in the mortuary of a military hospital in a suburb of Damascus following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, writes BBC.

Video and photos showed bodies wrapped in blood-stained white shrouds piled up inside a refrigerated room at Harasta Hospital on Monday.

Several of the bodies appeared to have wounds and bruising on their faces and torsos. Pieces of adhesive tape bearing numbers and names were also visible.

“I opened the door of the mortuary with my own hands, it was a horrific sight”, Mohammed al-Hajj, a member of a rebel group from southern Syria, told AFP news agency. He said the rebels had gone to hospital after receiving a tip from a member of staff about bodies being dumped there.

“We informed the [rebel] military command of what we found and co-ordinated with the Syrian Red Crescent, which transported the bodies to a Damascus hospital so that families can come and identify them”.

It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored at the mortuary, but they were at various stages of decomposition.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, says almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the Assad government’s prisons.

Human rights groups say more than 100,000 people have disappeared since Assad ordered a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011 that triggered the civil war. A Syrian non-governmental organisation said it was likely that the bodies in Harasta were detainees from the notorious Saydnaya prison, which is just to the north of Damascus.

“Harasta Hospital served as the main centre for collecting the bodies of detainees”, Diab Serriya, a co-founder of the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), told AFP.

“Bodies would be sent there from Saydnaya prison or Tishrin Hospital, and from Harasta, they would be transferred to mass graves”, he added.