CNN’s Clarissa Ward captured the incredible moment when a Syrian prisoner, who had been held in a windowless cell for three months and abandoned to die four days prior, was found and freed by her and her team.
“In nearly 20 years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed,” Ward wrote on social media of the prisoner’s reaction to seeing the sky for the first time in months.
“My God, there is light,” the man says to Ward and a soldier who shot the lock off his state prison cell and led him out to safety. He then hugs and kisses Ward, telling her, “Stay with me,” over and over, gripping her arm.
When they first find the man in a locked cell, he is hiding under a blanket. After several moments of standing breathlessly still, he is provoked to show himself by the soldier and quickly puts up his hands, imploring them not to shoot. “I’m a civilian,” he says via translator.
Once he learns that Ward is not there to hurt him, he takes her arm with both hands, refusing to let go.
Visibly moved, she gives him a bottle of water, saying, “You’re OK, you’re OK,” as he drinks.
Anchor Jake Tapper introduced the clip Wednesday by saying that the prisoner had no idea that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime had fallen.
Ward was hoping to find traces of American journalist Austin Tice, who’s been held as a captive in Syria since 2012. She explained that this secret prison was “tasked with surveillance, arrest and killing of all regime critics.”
Tice’s siblings told NPR on Tuesday that they have been informed their brother is still alive and still in Syria.
Abigail Edaburn, Tice’s sister, said, “These past few days have been incredibly intense and it does feel so different than how it’s felt in the past. It feels like anything is possible.”
Watch the moving scene in the embedded video above via CNN.
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