Overview
- Austin Tice, a former U.S. Marine and freelance journalist, vanished near Damascus on August 13, 2012 while covering the Syrian civil war.
- Bassam al-Hassan, a former adviser to Bashar al-Assad, told CNN that Tice was executed in 2013 on Assad’s orders, a claim that has not been independently verified.
- CNN reported that al-Hassan failed an FBI polygraph and multiple sources highlighted contradictions in his account.
- Tice’s parents publicly rejected al-Hassan’s story and maintained that their son is alive.
- The FBI says its investigation remains active, with new witness accounts after Assad’s fall and a September raid on a Syrian research site curtailed by regional instability.