And the men who worked as turnkeys behind the barbed wire — within the dirty white buildings that so often echoed with the screams of torture — simply abandoned their weapons, climbed into their fancy cars and drove away across the landscape, almost certainly into the arms of Israel.

Israel's proxy force, the South Lebanon Army, jailers to some 160 men and women and children in this dismal place, left to extraordinary scenes.

Triumphant villagers clambered up the suddenly empty watch towers, planting Hizbollah banners and blasting assault rifles into the air.

The SLA men leave with much blood on their hands, as human rights organisations have tirelessly reminded them.  So do the Israeli agents who trained them in interrogation techniques and — in effect — controlled the prison itself, in Israel's occupation zone.

Many of them will now hope that their crimes will be forgotten, drowned by the chaos and tragedies which flow from Israel's precipitous retreat and the SLA's collapse.

But their detainees won't forget.  Not ever.  One white-haired prisoner screamed "Freedom! Freedom!" as villagers — mostly Shia — smashed down his cell door with their bare hands.  "We are actually free at last!"

Others — overjoyed, overwhelmed — fainted with joy as their relatives poured in.  According to an Associated Press reporter — who witnessed the prisoners liberation — another man fell out of his cell, kissing the ground and sobbing incessantly.

"We didn't know what was going on at all, but we had a feeling we'd be out soon because of all the shelling and bombing we have been hearing," said another, as he ran from the building.  "We chased them away.  Our people actually won.  They avenged us."

Exhausted, hollow-cheeked, but almost hysterical with joy, some prisoners began to destroy the very prison that had held them — and many hundreds of other enemies of the SLA — for so long.  They smashed down doors.  They shattered windows.  The chanted "long live Nasrallah!" — in grateful praise of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of their Hizbollah liberators.

"God damn them. God damn them!" screamed one man, as he pounded a desk with his rifle butt.  Some of the villagers "captured" an abandoned armoured personnel carrier, and lurched off joyously down the hill to nearby Khiam village where they were given a rapturous welcome — a pelting with rice and rose petals.

The horrors of Khiam have yet to be fully written.  Human rights groups — the Lebanese Follow-Up Committee for Detainees in Israeli Jails, for instance — have said that electrocution and beating were routine.  Detainees, it said, were often hung from posts for hours and beaten with steel rods on their heads and genitalia.