By Tim Lister and Eyad Kourdi, CNN
A man discovered in a locked cell in a Syrian prison. Photo: CNN
A man who was filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus jail was a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed.
CNN initially found the man while pursuing leads on the missing US 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 jail that was padlocked from the outside. The guard blew off the lock 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 bewildered. 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 where he had been confined. The man also said he was not aware that the Assad regime had fallen. He was being held in a jail that had been run by the Syrian air force's intelligence services until the Assad regime collapsed.
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 in Homs gave CNN a photograph said to be of the same man while he was on duty, in what appears to be a government office. Facial recognition software provided a match of more than 99 percent with the man CNN met in the 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, multiple residents of Homs said that the man was Salama, also known as Abu Hamza. They told CNN that he was known for running the Air Force Intelligence Directorate's 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 jail, and CNN has not been able to reestablish contact 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 that he had been jailed for less than a month because of a dispute over "profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer." CNN cannot independently verify this claim.
Rebel guards handed him over to the Syrian Red Crescent. The medical relief organization later posted a picture of him on social media, saying they had returned a freed prisoner to relatives in Damascus.
Salama's current whereabouts are unknown.
- CNN