CNN says it is investigating the background and identity of a man featured in a stunning recent report that appears to show his discovery in and release from a Syrian prison.
The report, that aired last weekshowed CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her team encountering a man in a cell and helping him out of prison after the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime.
Ward reported that he identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs, and that he said he had been in prison for three months. He said he was taken from his home, interrogated on his phone and asked for “names of terrorists,” according to CNN’s translation of the initial report.
Last weekend, a Syrian fact-checking organization, Verify-Sy, questioned CNN’s reporting: claim the man’s name is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.
According to Verify-Sy, he was an officer in the brutal intelligence service of the Syrian Air Force. The fact-check group accused Salama of involvement in “theft, extortion and pressuring residents [of Homs] to become informants.”
Citing interviews with locals in Homs, Verify-Sy reported that the man spent less than a month in prison due to a “dispute over the profit sharing of extorted funds with a senior officer.”
The site alleged that Salama had also been involved in the murder of civilians and the detention and torture of young men on false charges in 2014.
JS has not independently verified these claims.
Verify-Sy also questioned the veracity of CNN’s report in general, suggesting that the man’s appearance and reactions were inconsistent with the conditions in which he claimed to have been held.
In a statement, a CNN spokesperson told JS: “No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison facility featured in our report that day.”
“The events happened as they appear in our film. The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was made by the guard – a Syrian rebel,” the report continued. “We reported the scene as it happened, including what the inmate told us, with clear attribution.”
The spokesperson said CNN is now investigating the man’s background “and is aware that he may have provided a false identity.”
“We are continuing our reporting on this and the broader story,” the statement said.
After a rebel offensive toppled the Assad regime on December 8, rebels began releasing the government’s political prisoners en masse.
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CNN initially reported that the prisoner was unaware that Assad’s government had fallen, and that he learned of this when Ward’s team, accompanied by a rebel guard, discovered him locked in a prison cell in Damascus.
Last week, Ward reported that they were at the Damascus facility, a prison building near the Syrian Air Force Intelligence headquarters, to do a story on the thousands of Syrians who disappeared into Assad’s prisons, specifically Austin Tice , an American journalist. who is still missing after being held in Syria more than a decade ago.