A man who was freed from a Damascus prison live on CNN last week by correspondent Clarissa Ward was actually an intelligence officer who worked for toppled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, CNN confirmed on Monday.
The man, who was overcome with emotion in the initial video and would not let go of Ward’s hand, initially identified himself as Adel Ghurbal from the city of Homs, which is about 100 miles north of Damascus. In the video, he said he had been kept in a windowless cell for three months and was not aware that rebel fighters had ousted Assad’s 24-year reign.
CNN reported on Monday that facial recognition software made a 99% match to a photo of a lieutenant in the Assad regime’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate named Salama Mohammad Salama. The photo, which showed him wearing a military uniform, was provided by a resident of the Bayada neighborhood in Homs.
After the video went went viral, local residents alerted the news outlet that the man was no ordinary prisoner, as he had claimed, but an official who had a reputation for extortion and harassment.
CNN has so far not been able to verify how Salama came to be in the jail and does not know where he is now.
Verify-Sy, which identifies itself as a Syrian fact-checking website, first identified the man as Salama and said he was imprisoned because of a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.” CNN was not able to independently verify the claim.
After Salama was handed over to the Syrian Red Crescent, the humanitarian organization, which is similar to the Red Cross, said he was returned to relatives in Damascus.