Thousands of mourners in the village of Tafas, near the southern Syrian town of Daraa, burned the local Baath Party headquarters and a police station on Saturday during the funeral of a protester killed a day earlier, residents said.

The mourners, chanting for freedom, were marching in the funeral procession of Kamal Baradan, a protester killed on Friday in Daraa.

Just a day earlier protesters set fire to a bronze statue of the country's late president, Hafez Assad, a resident reported. Syrians throughout the country took to the streets on 'Friday of Dignity', and at least 23 were killed in bloody clashes with security officials.

Hundreds of Syrian protesters, chanting for freedom, gathered on Saturday in the main square in the southern town of Daraa, a witness said.

The witness said three bare-chested young men climbed onto the rubble of the statue of late President Hafez al-Assad, with cardboard signs reading "the people want the downfall of the regime".

Syrian authorities attempted to placate the restless masses Friday, releasing 260 prisoners, mostly Islamists, from Saydnaya jail, a human rights lawyer said.

"These are prisoners who have completed at least three-quarters of their sentences and are entitled to be freed but the authorities rarely granted them that right before," the rights lawyer, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

Despite this supposed step forward towards meeting protesters' demands, security troops stormed a protest sit-in near the capital Damascus, arresting about 200 people in the midnight raid, activists said Saturday.

The activists said up to 4,000 people were demonstrating in the town of Douma on the outskirts of Damascus when, around midnight Friday, electricity was cut and the protesters came under attack. The activists spoke on condition of anonymity fearing reprisals.

They said troops attacked the protesters with sticks and clubs, injuring several, but the reports could not be independently confirmed. An eyewitness who drove to Douma Saturday said there were no traces of a fight in the area and shops were open.

The Douma midnight raid capped a day of a relentless government crackdowns on the protests that dramatically spread to multiple cities across Syria. The once-unimaginable scenario posed the biggest challenge in decades to Syria's iron-fisted rule.

Funerals were under way Saturday across Syria for many of those killed the previous day.

Videos posted on social networking sites Friday night showed protesters in Homs, a Syrian central city in which a protester was reportedly killed, tearing down a large poster of Hafez Assad, the late Syrian president, over the entrance to the Officers' Club.

In the southern city of Daraa, protesters on Friday regained control of the al-Omari mosque - the epicenter of the past week's deadly protests.

A Daraa resident said up to 2,000 people were holed up in and around the mosque on Saturday, adding security troops had retreated.

The Syrian government said 34 had been slain in Daraa before Friday, while the U.N. human rights office put the figure at 37. Activists said it was as high as 100.

According to a report issued by the human rights organization Amnesty International, 55 have been killed since protests began.