CNN says it is investigating the background and identity of a man featured in a stunning recent report appearing to show his discovery in and release from a Syrian prison.
The report, which aired last week, showed CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her team coming across a man in a cell and assisting him out of the facility following 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 imprisoned for three months. He said he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and asked about “names of terrorists,” per CNN’s translation in the initial report.
Over the weekend, a Syrian fact-checking organization, Verify-Sy, cast doubt on CNN’s reporting, alleging that the man’s name is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.
According to Verify-Sy, he was an officer of the brutal Syrian Air Force Intelligence. The fact-checking group accused Salama of involvement in “theft, extortion, and coercing residents [of Homs] into becoming informants.”
Citing interviews with Homs locals, Verify-Sy reported that the man had been incarcerated for less than a month due to a “dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”
The site alleged that Salama had also been involved in the killings of civilians, and detention and torture of young men on spurious charges in 2014.
HuffPost has not independently verified these claims.
Verify-Sy also questioned the veracity of CNN’s report overall, suggesting the man’s appearance and reactions were incongruous with the conditions he claimed to have been held in.
In a statement, a CNN spokesperson told HuffPost, “No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison building featured in our report that day.”
“The events transpired as they appear in our film. The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard – a Syrian rebel,” it continued. “We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution.”
The spokesperson said CNN is now investigating the man’s background “and are aware that he may have given a false identity.”
“We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story,” the statement said.
After a rebel offensive overthrew the Assad regime on Dec. 8, rebel forces began releasing the government’s political prisoners en masse.
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CNN initially reported that the prisoner had not been aware Assad’s government had fallen, and that he learned of it when Ward’s team, accompanied by a guard from the rebel forces, discovered him locked in a Damascus prison cell.
Last week, Ward reported they were at the Damascus facility, a prison building at the Syrian air force intelligence headquarters, to do a story about the thousands of Syrians who disappeared into Assad’s prisons, in particular Austin Tice, an American journalist who is still missing after he was detained in Syria more than a decade ago.
