Incredible moment CNN’s Clarissa Ward rescues ‘hidden prisoner’ from Assad’s hellhole jail while searching for American journalist Austin Tice

CNN’s Clarissa affiliate witnessed the moment a captured man in one of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s infamous prisons became a free man.

Ward was walking around one of the prisons where thousands of civilians were tortured and beaten to death in an attempt to find American journalist Austin Tice, who was captured in the war-torn country 12 years ago when she came across a still locked cell. with a blanket on the floor.

After a guard shot the lock, Ward and one of the victorious Syrian rebels entered the cell, where Ward commented that she thought she saw the blanket moving and asked if anyone was there.

Soon you saw a man sitting up with his arms up, pleading, “I am a citizen. I am a citizen.’

Once the prisoner realized he was in no danger, he tells Ward how he was held in a windowless cell for three months, holding her arm with both hands.

Startled, Ward asked for water for the man, who gulped it down – later revealing he went without food or water for four days as his captors fled to the rebels during the fall of Damascus.

Once he was brought outside, the man stared at the sky, took a deep breath and repeated the phrase, “O God, there is light.”

He then kissed both the reporter and the rebel she was with as they made him sit down.

At that point, he begged Ward to “stay with me” as he began sharing his story.

“For three months I knew nothing about my family,” says the father from Homs. “I haven’t heard anything about my children.”

When a rebel then tells him that there is “no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints,” the former prisoner couldn’t believe what he was hearing until the rebel insisted, “Syria is free.”

The still-shocked former prisoner then kisses the rebel again and tells how agents from Assad’s intelligence service took him from his home and began interrogating him about his phone.

“They brought me here to Damascus, they asked me for the names of terrorists,” he said.

The rebel then asks if he was hit at all during his time in prison, to which he replied that he was.

By the time a paramedic shows up, the shock of his freedom apparently sets in, as he can be seen shaking and on the verge of tears.

‘Everything is fine. The Red Crescent is coming to help you,’ a man tries to assure him.

‘You are safe, don’t be afraid anymore. Everything you fear is gone,” he said.

But when the man was then led into a vehicle, he again appeared frightened, explaining: “Every car I got into, I was blindfolded.”

The Syrian Network for Human Rights claims that more than 157,000 people have been arrested or forcibly disappeared since the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011 – including 5,274 children and 10,221 women.

The detainees included protesters, human rights defenders, political dissidents, doctors treating demonstrators or opposition members, as well as their relatives.

More than 1,500 people died under torture, which included electrocuting genitals or hanging weights; burning them with oil, metal rods, gunpowder or flammable pesticides; crushing heads between a wall and the prison cell door; inserting needles or metal pins into bodies; and depriving prisoners of clothing, bathing and toilet facilities, the Human Rights Network said.

The worst appeared to be Sednaya prison, outside Damascus, which was the size of 184 football stadiums and surrounded by two minefields.

A 2017 Amnesty International report found that thousands of people died in mass hangings in Sednaya, which it called a “human slaughterhouse.”

Between 20 and 50 people were killed every week, usually on Monday and Wednesday evenings. Amnesty estimated that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed between September 2011 and December 2015.

Detainees were sent to a ‘trial’ in one of the two field courts of the military police headquarters in the al-Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus. These tests would last ‘one to three minutes’.

On the day of the execution, the prisoners were told they were being transferred to a civilian prison elsewhere, but were instead taken to a basement and severely beaten, before being transferred to another detention facility in Sednaya to be hanged.

Those who survived suffered intense suffering. They were blindfolded at all times and could hear the sound of blows and screams echoing through vents and pipes.

Some victims were also held underground in freezer cells designed for one person with dimensions of 2.5 by 1.5 meters, but which could accommodate up to 15 people at a time.

Prisoners at Mezze air base, meanwhile, were forced to behave like dogs, donkeys, cats or other animals.

If they didn’t play their part, they would be defeated.

Guards at the prison also regularly hung prisoners naked from a fence on cold nights and sprayed water on them, and the New York Times described how an inmate there was stuffed into a tire and beaten.

Sexual violence was also common in these prisons, with the Syrian Network for Human Rights once reporting: ‘At midnight they took the beautiful girls to Colonel Suleiman [Juma, head of the Syrian state security’s Branch 320 in Hama] rape.’

He and his friends would then sexually assault them in a bedroom next to his office decorated with Assad’s photo, where they would sprinkle arak – a powerful drink – on the victims.

When the Assad regime was finally overthrown on Sunday, many concerned relatives and rebels poured into these prisons to find their loved ones and rescue anyone still in a cell.

Assad had repeatedly denied killing thousands of people in Sadnaya and using a secret crematorium to dispose of their remains in 2017.

He even labeled the US State Department’s allegations that up to 50 people were being hanged in the military prison every day as “a new Hollywood story divorced from reality.”

However, the former president has now fled his home country with the help of the Kremlin.

Three sources told Bloomberg News that Moscow arranged for Assad to escape through his air base on the Syrian coast using a “transponder trick.”

He was reportedly ordered not to tell anyone, turn off his transponder and board his private plane in the capital Damascus.

The plane then traveled to Russia’s Khmeimim air base on the Syrian coast before Assad headed to Moscow, possibly on a military plane, the sources claim.