CNN says it examines the background and identity of a man who appeared in a fantastic recent report shows up to show his discovery in and release from a Syrian prison.

The report, which aired last weekshowed CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her team coming across a man in a cell and helping him out of the facility after the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime.

Ward reported that he identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs and that he said he had been detained for three months. He said he had been taken from his home, questioned about his phone and asked about “names of terrorists,” according to CNN’s translation of the initial report.

Over the weekend, a Syrian fact-checking organization, Verify-Sy, cast doubt on CNN’s reporting, claims the man’s name is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.

According to Verify-Sy, he was an officer of the brutal Syrian Air Force Intelligence. The fact-finding group accused Salama of involvement in “theft, extortion and forcing residents (of Homs) to become informants.”

Citing interviews with locals in Homs, Verify-Sy reported that the man had been detained for less than a month due to a “dispute over the sharing of profits from extorted funds with a senior official.”

The website claimed that Salama had also been involved in the killing of civilians and the detention and torture of young men on false charges in 2014.

HuffPost has not independently verified these claims.

Verify-Sy also questioned the veracity of CNN’s report overall, suggesting that the man’s appearance and reactions were inconsistent with the conditions in which he claimed to have been held.

In a statement, a CNN spokesperson told HuffPost, “No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison building featured in our report that day.”

“The events occurred as they appear in our film. The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was made by the guard – a Syrian rebel,” it continued. “We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution.”

The spokesman said CNN is now investigating the man’s background “and is aware that he may have provided a false identity.”

“We are continuing our reporting on this and the wider story,” the statement said.

After a rebel offensive toppled the Assad regime on December 8, rebel forces began releasing government political prisoners en masse.

CNN initially reported that the prisoner had been unaware that Assad’s government had fallen and that he found out when Ward’s team, along with a guard from the rebel forces, discovered him locked in a prison cell in Damascus.

Last week, Ward reported that they were at the Damascus facility, a prison building at the Syrian Air Force’s intelligence headquarters, to do a story on the thousands of Syrians who disappeared into Assad’s prisons, particularly Austin Tice, an American journalist which is still missing after he was arrested in Syria more than a decade ago.