CNN’s Clarissa Ward helped free an abandoned prisoner from one of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s notorious jails while searching for an American journalist.
Ward was touring the detention site where countless civilians were tortured and beaten to death when her team stumbled upon a cell which was still locked.
The lock needed to be shot open before Ward and a Syrian rebel entered the cell where the journalist remarked that she thought she saw the blanket move and asked if anyone was there.
A man could be seen sitting up with his arms raised, pleading: ‘I’m a civilian. I’m a civilian.’
Once the prisoner realized he was not in danger, he told Ward how he had been held in a windowless cell for three months – clutching her arm with both hands as he emerged into daylight.
Ward provided water for the man – later revealing that he was left without any food or water for four days when his captors fled during the fall of Damascus to rebel forces.
Once he was brought outside, the man stared up at the sky and breathed deeply, repeating the phrase, ‘Oh God, there is light.’
He then kissed both the reporter and the rebel she was with, as they sat him down.
He pleaded with Ward to ‘stay with me,’ as he started to share his story.
‘For three months, I didn’t know anything about my family,’ the father from Homs said. ‘I didn’t hear anything about my children.’
When a rebel then tells him there is ‘no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints,’ the former prisoner could not believe what he was hearing, until the rebel insists, ‘Syria is free.’
The still-shaken former prisoner then kisses the rebel again, and tells how officers from Assad’s intelligence service took him from his home and started to interrogate him about his phone.
‘They brought me here to Damascus, they asked me about names of terrorists,’ he recounted.
The rebel then asks whether 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 could be seen shaking and on the verge of tears.
‘Everything is okay. The Red Crescent is coming to help you,’ a man tries to assure him.
‘You are safe, don’t be afraid anymore. Everything you are afraid of is gone,’ he said.
But when the man was then led inside a vehicle, he once again seemed afraid, explaining: ‘Every car I got into, they blindfolded me.’
