CNN reported Monday evening that it had wrongly identified a man who appeared in a video report claiming to be a long-term prisoner of former President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.
In reality, the man is a former Syrian intelligence officer.
In a CNN story published last week, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew were led by Syrian rebels into a Syrian air force headquarters in Damascus to look for Austin Tice, a missing American who they believed might have been held in a secret prison there. Instead, they discovered a locked cell where a man was hiding under a blanket.
The man identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed that he had been in solitary confinement for three months. He appeared surprised and overwhelmed to learn that Assad’s regime had fallen. The footage, if verifiable, would have been astounding.
However, reports online suggested that the man might be lying about his identity. He appeared well-groomed and uninjured, and a website called Verify-Sy, which states that it fact-checks stories about Syria, said that it could not find any such “Adel Gharbal.”
Verify-Sy reported that residents of a neighborhood called Al Bayyada in Homs had identified the man as Salama Mohammad Salama, or “Abu Hamza,” a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence.
On Monday, CNN was able to confirm that it was Salama.
“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Ward posted on X Monday evening.
A resident of Al Bayyada provided CNN with a photograph of the same man, who appeared to be on duty in a government office. CNN was able to use facial recognition software to provide a match of more than 99 percent with the man who’d appeared in their report.
While Verify-Sy also said that Salama had been jailed for less than a month for a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a high-ranking officer,” CNN was not able to verify this claim.
Multiple residents have accused Salama of having a reputation for extortion and harassment. More than a few journalists voiced their outrage at CNN’s reporting.
“Amazing that she just drops this like a further development to the story and not an embarrassing piece of misinformation and poor reporting,” wrote Christin El-Kholy, an editor for New Lines Magazine, in a post on X.
Journalist Tariq Kenney-Shawa slammed Ward’s response. “No retraction, no apologies. The style of journalism that reporters like Clarissa Ward engage in is more about promoting themselves, their brand, & emotional narratives they believe will bolster their ratings, rather than reporting accurately & conscientiously,” he wrote.
And others were just disturbed by just how ridiculous it was to falsely portray the jailer as the prisoner. “You got played by a corrupt intelligence officer from a dead dictatorship,” journalist Jacob Silverman wrote in a post on X, responding to Ward.