The scene was too beautiful. Dispatched to the Syrian capital of Damascus to find her American colleague Austin Tice, who had been imprisoned in a secret Syrian prison since his arrest in 2012, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward plunges into one of the Assad government’s penitentiary institutions where torture and repression were rife.
The “chief international correspondent” of the network was accompanied by a group of armed individuals as she explores the halls of the now empty prison. Then, they discover one single cell door still locked. After her armed escort shoots the lock off the door, they walk in to discover a suspicious shape, buried under blankets, at the bottom of the cell.
The man with the rifle approaches, pulls on the pile of fabric and discovers what appears to be a human being. Suddenly, a not-too-disheveled man emerges from beneath the blankets with his hands raised, appearing to beg for mercy. It’s a prisoner, a lone captive somehow left behind when all the jails had been liberated.
And the whole scene of an astonished Clarissa Ward “freeing” one of Assad’s last prisoners was filmed by the CNN camera for the whole world to witness.
Several sequences follow in which the journalist takes the man out of the prison, tells him that the regime has fallen and that he has no reason to be afraid any more. She brings him water and immediately sits him down in a chair for an interview.
The individual, who clings to Ward’s hand the entire time, claims to have been arrested by the Mukhabarat, the Syrian military intelligence service, and interrogated and tortured to give the names of terrorists.
He says his name is “Adel Gharbal” and that he’s from the “city of Homs,” in the west of the country. Gharbal revealed he’d been locked in a cell “for three months.” He marvels at the sight of the sun when he emerges into the open air.
His liberation by CNN’s news team was the marquee report on the network on Thursday, Dec. 12. In the next 24 hours, the story went viral around the world.
It all seemed like a perfect made-for-TV moment. As it turns out, that may have been exactly what it was.
According to the Syrian media fact-checker Verify-Sy, “Adel Gharbal” lied about his identity and the conditions of his imprisonment. In a counter-investigation published on Sunday, Dec. 15, Verify-Sy revealed that he is actually a man named Salama Mohammad Salama and is a first lieutenant of the Syrian Air Force intelligence services.
Known as “Abu Hamza,” he allegedly ran several security checkpoints in the city of Homs and was “involved in theft, extortion, and coercion of residents to become informants.” According to residents of the Al-Bayada neighborhood interviewed by the investigative media outlet, his incarceration – “which lasted less than a month” – was due to a dispute with a higher-ranking officer over the sharing of profits from extorted funds. He was not a political prisoner of Bashar Al-Assad.
As soon as the CNN report was broadcast, the odds of the encounter, as well as the physical state of “Adel Gharbal” (clean, without apparent injuries, and in good physical health), caught the attention of several viewers.
Ward does not seem surprised at all that “Gharbal” is the last prisoner remaining captive in the prison, several days after the fall of the government on Sunday, Dec. 8, which is when all the other inmates were set free.
“The man, hidden under a blanket despite the gunshots used to force the lock of his cell, claimed that he had not seen the light of day for three months,” Verify-Sy pointed out. “However, his reaction did not correspond to this statement: He did not flinch or blink, even when he looked at the sky, apparently delighted with his new ‘freedom.’”
Importantly, “despite his seemingly innocent and calm demeanor in the CNN report,” Verify-Sy reveals that Abu Hamza participated in military operations on multiple fronts in Homs in 2014. During those operations, he allegedly killed civilians and was responsible for the detention and torture of many young men without reason or on the basis of fabricated charges.
“Many were targeted simply because they refused to pay bribes or cooperate, or even for arbitrary reasons such as their appearance,” the fact-checking site said. These details were corroborated by victims’ families and former detainees who spoke to Verify-Sy.
These revelations raise new questions: Did Clarissa Ward and her film crew know who “Adel Gharbal” really was when filming their report? Were they knowingly participating in a fraudulent act staged to deceive the global public? Or were they somehow tricked into participating in a propaganda scheme concocted by Syria’s new jihadist rulers?
Asked by her colleagues at CNN how she felt while filming this report, Ward explained: “To witness such a surreal moment, to see a person in a state of absolute joy on one hand and completely traumatized on the other, is something that none of us will ever forget.”
After being exposed by Verify-Sy, Ward posted a simple reversal on Monday, Dec. 16, to her X account:
“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama.”
That was it; there was no further explanation given. The video of her report remains on CNN’s website as of this writing, with a link to a follow-up story that attempts to pin all blame on Salama rather than the finding any fault with the shoddy journalism involved.
This is an edited and updated version of an article that originally appeared in L’Humanité.
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