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

CNN initially found the man while following up on leads about 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 prison that was padlocked from the outside. The guard blew the lock with a gun and the man was found alone in the cell under a blanket.

When he came outside, 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 that he had been kept in a cell for three months, adding that this was the third prison where he had been detained. The man also said he did not know that the Assad regime had fallen. He was held in a prison 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 true 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 photo that allegedly showed the same man while on duty in what appeared to be a government office. Facial recognition software found a more than 99 percent match with the man CNN met in the prison cell in Damascus. The photo shows him sitting at a desk, apparently wearing military clothing. CNN is not publishing the photo to protect the source’s anonymity.

While CNN continued to seek information about the released prisoner after the original report, several Homs residents said the man was Salama, also known as Abu Hamza. They told CNN that he was known for running the Air Force Intelligence Directorate checkpoints in the city and accused him of being known for extortion and harassment.

It is unclear how or why Salama ended up in Damascus prison, and CNN has not been able to re-establish contact with him. Over the weekend, Verify-Sy, a Syrian fact-checking website, was the first to identify the man as Salama. It said he had been sentenced to less than a month in prison over a dispute over “sharing of profits from extorted funds with a higher-ranking official.” CNN cannot independently verify this claim.

Insurgent guards handed him over to the Syrian Red Crescent. The medical charity later posted a picture of him on social media and said they had returned a released prisoner to relatives in Damascus.

Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.