The prisoner that CNN 'helped' free was actually...a torturer for the Assad regime

2024-12-17 15:49:16Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
The prisoner that CNN 'helped' free was actually...a torturer for the
Footage of his release from a prison in Damascus

A man filmed by CNN being freed by rebels from a Damascus prison was a former intelligence officer in the ousted Syrian regime, according to locals, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed.

CNN first found the prisoner while following up on 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 locked from the outside. The guard broke the locks with a gun, and the man was found alone inside the cell, under a blanket.

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

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

But today the true identity of the man, said to be a lieutenant in the Assad regime's Air Force Intelligence Directorate, Salama Mohammad Salama, has been revealed.

But a recently discovered photograph shows him in military uniform and sitting inside an office. Not only is the person no ordinary citizen imprisoned by the Assad regime, but there are strong suspicions that he is one of the torturers of other prisoners.



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