WASHINGTON – An NBC News correspondent who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012 has changed his account of what happened to him.
The New York Times reports that Richard Engel, who originally said he and two other journalists on his team were kidnapped by Shiite Muslim forces associated with President Bashar al-Assad’s government, now says his abductors were part of a Sunni militant group, and that they had a relationship with Engel’s rescuers.
Engel writes on the NBC News website that the Times contacted him about a month ago because they had “information that suggested the kidnappers were not who they said they were.”
Engel and his team retraced their steps as best they could, although he says the situation in Syria, including the rise of ISIS, meant that they couldn’t go back to the area they were taken. But they found as many indirect sources as they could, and Engel says, “based on all of our reporting, it is clear that we were kidnapped by a criminal gang for money and released for propaganda purposes.”
He concluded, “This, of course, does not make our kidnappers or the five days they held us at gunpoint any less dangerous. It does, however, underscore the treacherous and violent nature of the conflict inside Syria.”
