Hello and welcome to NewsAv from the BBC World Service.

We're coming to you live from London.

I'm James Menendez.

And we're going to begin in Syria because amid all the celebrations at the fall of the Assad regime

and the joy of those who've now escaped the horrors of his prisons,

there is, of course, much grief and sadness.

For the families who've been unable to find their missing fathers and sons,

and those who found only their dead bodies.

Among them, a man whose devastating accounts of the regime's torture chambers

helped the world understand its cruelty and depravity.

He was Mazan al-Hamada, and his body was found on Monday in the morgue of the Sedanaya prison just outside Damascus.

Well, today his funeral was held in the city, and hundreds of people came to pay their respects and to voice their anger

at what had happened to Mazen and so many others.

From Damascus, Yogi Tlemaia reports and a warning that report does include some distressing

details.

We're at a hospital where bodies, the dead bodies that were found in Seidnea prison,

a lot of them have been brought.

And just as we were here, we saw a family that was crying that has come in.

We're still to understand their story.

But from what we can tell, they've just found out that their son, the mother who is crying, her son,

they've just found out that his dead body has been found.

And I can see a younger man, somebody who looks,

...