CNN Airs Fake Syria Prisoner Story

CNN says it is investigating the identity of a Syrian man who may have given the network a “false identity” during a segment depicting his apparent release from a secret Damascus prison, after a Syrian fact-checking organization alleged he participated in the torture and killing of civilians.

The harrowing report was fronted by the network’s chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, who, along with a crew, visited the prison on Dec. 11 in the wake of the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

During the segment, broadcast a day later, Ward says they were there looking for the missing American journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped while reporting in Syria in 2012.

The CNN crew entered the facility followed by an armed guard—a CNN source told the Daily Beast the guard was a Syrian rebel.

Once inside, they noticed a locked cell with a blanket possibly covering something on the floor. The guard agreed to shoot the lock open, but asked that the CNN crew to turn its cameras off.

With the door opened and the cameras turned back on, the crew discovered a man in the cell underneath the blanket. He identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs and said he had been kept in the cell for three months.

“You’re OK, you’re OK,” Ward told the man, who appeared unaware that Assad’s dictatorship had been overthrown.

On Sunday, however, a Syrian fact-checking group claimed his story doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny.

Verify-Sy, which is part of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, reported that it identified the man as a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, an intelligence agency that served the Assad regime.

After a search of public records that it said could not confirm his professed identity, along with interviews with locals in Homs, Verify-Sy alleged his name is Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.