Syrian rebels who seized the provincial capital of Idlib from the Assad regime at the weekend freed scores of prisoners crammed into small cells in the main state security building.
Video posted on YouTube showed the prisoners being freed by the rebels.
The camera shows women waiting in a room, before rebel fighters enter the space between the shuttered cells and break the locks off.
Men pour out of the cells, filling the room and kissing their liberators on the cheeks. Many of the men in the video are middle-aged, or even elderly.
The Al Qaeda linked Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham over-ran Idlib city in north-west Syria on Friday and Saturday.
It is only the second provincial city to fall entirely out of control of the government, led by Bashar al-Assad, and its loss shows the pressure the regime remains under four years into the uprising against its rule.
As well as the state security prison, the rebels in Idlib also seized a military intelligence building where they found the bodies of 15 men they said regime forces had executed before fleeing.
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