Days after airing an emotional segment showing a man supposedly freed from a Syrian prison, CNN updated its story to acknowledge that the “victim” of Bashar al-Assad’s regime was actually an Assad intelligence officer accused of torturing and extorting local residents.
The network’s update did not include a retraction or an apology and comes after CNN came under fire for possibly “fabricating” the story after fact-checking group Verify-Sy reported that the man had been identified as a torturer for the deposed Syrian dictator. In the wake of Verify-Sy’s report, CNN stated that it was investigating whether the freed prisoner had given their reporters a “false identity.”
