CNN confirmed Monday that it had been deceived about the identity of a man featured in a viral news report last week appearing to show the moment he was found in a Syrian prison and freed.
The man told CNN he was Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed he had been locked up for three months, but a Syrian fact-checking group later cast doubt on those assertions and said it had identified him as Salama Mohammad Salama, an officer of the notorious Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.
CNN told HuffPost earlier on Monday it was investigating if the man gave a “false identity.”
“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Clarissa Ward, who led the initial report, posted on social media Monday evening.
CNN published an article elaborating on its findings.
“A man who was filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus jail was a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed,” the opening of the article read.
Salam was found in a jail run by the Syrian Air Force’s intelligence services until Bashar Assad’s regime collapsed on Dec. 8, according to CNN. The network said its team was there to pursue leads on the missing American journalist, Austin Tice.
CNN said a resident of the Bayada neighborhood in Homs provided a photo of Salama apparently on duty in military garb, which CNN found, via facial recognition technology, to be a 99% match with the man in its report.
Locals also told CNN Salama had a reputation for extortion and harassment.
The network said it had been unable to reestablish contact with him.
It noted that Verify-Sy, the Syrian fact-checking organization, had been the first to identify Salama over the weekend. CNN’s findings aligned with what the group reported, though they were more limited.
The group also reported that Salama had been involved in numerous acts of violence and that he had been jailed for less than a month after a “dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”
After the initial report aired, Ward posted, “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”
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According to CNN’s translation, the man told them he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and beaten. He suggested he did not know Assad’s regime had fallen until his shock discovery in the cell. Ward’s team provided him with food and water before he was taken away by workers with a medical relief group.
CNN was accompanied by a guard from the rebel forces, who the network said was the one to approve the man’s release.
