CNN has admitted that a report by prominent journalist Clarissa Ward from Syria claiming to have discovered a prisoner in a Damascus prison was false.

The video report's description said, "Clarissa Ward discovered a man in a Damascus prison cell who claimed to be an ordinary citizen imprisoned by President Bashar al-Assad's regime."

When Ward, her cameraman, and a HTS fighter entered the cell, a man lying under a blanket suddenly stood up and acted surprised to see them. He claimed he had been held in the cell for three months and was unaware of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government.

However, online observers quickly noted that the report was inaccurate and was orchestrated by Ward and CNN for dramatic effect.

After CNN posted a link to the video report on X, which remains undeleted, a community note referred to the act as “clearly orchestrated.”

“There is no opportunity for a prisoner who has been in the dark to look wide-eyed at the sun. In addition, his jacket is clean, he has a fresh haircut and clean fingernails, which is not a likely condition in Syrian prisons,” the memo explained.

Moreover, the prison was opened, and prisoners were released days before when HTS fighters took control of Damascus on December 8.

CNN later retracted the report, claiming the man and his team had been misled.

CNN explained the mistake by claiming that Syrians from Homs identified the man as Salama Mohammed Salama, a lieutenant in the former Syrian government's Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

"Facial recognition software provided a more than 99 percent match with the man CNN met in a Damascus prison cell," CNN wrote, acknowledging that the image showed him sitting at a desk, wearing what appeared to be military clothing.

However, CNN declined to provide evidence of the image's existence, saying: "CNN will not publish the image to protect the identity of the source."

Verify-sy, a Syrian fact-checking organization, quotes local residents as saying that Salameh ran various security checkpoints throughout Homs and was involved in “theft, extortion, and forcing residents to become informants.” According to these sources, he was recently arrested for his involvement in extortion.

After the government fell last week, many Syrians went to prisons and hospitals to search for loved ones detained or disappeared during the war, which began in 2011.

In March of that year, al-Qaeda militants, including from HTS's predecessor group, Jabhat al-Nusra, launched an insurgency to overthrow the government with the help of foreign intelligence agencies.

Syrian intelligence arrested many Syrians during the war, some on suspicion of supporting the rebellion and others for no apparent reason. Many were never seen again.

Clarissa Ward has a history of reporting in Gaza and Syria, and Ward has admitted that her previous reporting in Syria was not truthful.

In a June 2021 interview with CBS News, Ward, CNN's chief international correspondent, acknowledged bias in her reporting.

“Yes, you know, I will admit the fact that I think I crossed the line in Syria. I became too emotionally involved, and I was crushed by the U.S. response and policy (of openly supporting the rebels),” Ward said while calling for regime change and imposing brutal economic sanctions that punished Syrian civilians.

Ward also became embroiled in controversy on October 10, 2024, in the Gaza Strip, after she published a live, composite report about being subjected to Palestinian shelling, the veracity of which has not yet been proven, without accountability.