Freed prisoner who said he was a victim of the Assad regime was an intelligence officer, locals say

CNN
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A man filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus prison was a former intelligence officer with the ousted Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been jailed as he had claimed.

CNN initially found the man while searching for missing American journalist Austin Tice. In a video report, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her team, accompanied by a rebel guard, came across a cell in a Damascus prison that was padlocked from the outside. The guard blew the lock off with a gun and the man was found alone inside the cell, under a blanket.

When he emerged into the open, the man appeared confused. Questioned by the rebel fighter who freed him, the man identified himself as Adel Ghurbal from the central Syrian city of Homs.

He claimed that he had been kept in a cell for three months, adding that it was the third prison in which he had been confined. The man also said he was unaware that the Assad regime had fallen. He was held in a prison that had been run by Syrian Air Force intelligence until the collapse of the Assad regime.

An image obtained by CNN on Monday now points to the man’s real identity – said to be a lieutenant in the Assad regime’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate, Salama Mohammad Salama.

A resident of the Bayada neighborhood of Homs provided CNN with a photograph said to be of the same man while on duty in what appears to be a government office. Facial recognition software produced a more than 99 percent match with the man CNN met in a Damascus prison cell. The photograph shows him sitting at a desk, apparently in military clothing. CNN is not publishing the photo to protect the source’s anonymity.

As CNN continued to pursue information about the freed prisoner after the original report, several Homs residents said the man was Salama, also known as Abu Hamza. They told CNN he was known to run Air Force Intelligence Directorate checkpoints in the city and accused him of having a reputation for extortion and harassment.

It’s unclear how or why Salama ended up in the Damascus prison, and CNN has been unable to reconnect with him. Over the weekend, Verify-Sy, which says it is a Syrian fact-checking website, was the first to identify the man as Salama. It said he had been jailed for less than a month over a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.” CNN cannot independently confirm this claim.

Rebel guards handed him over to the Syrian Red Crescent. The medical aid organization later issued a picture of him on social mediaa, and said they had returned a released prisoner to relatives in Damascus.

Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.