Ex-Syrian official claims Austin Tice was killed in 2013

The U.S. government is investigating claims by a former senior Syrian official that Marine veteran and freelance journalist Austin Tice was killed in Syria in 2013 at the order of then-President Bashar al-Assad.

The claim by Bassam al-Hassan, a strategic advisor and member of Assad’s inner circle, has not been corroborated, sources told The Washington Post.

FBI and CIA agents interviewed Hassan in Beirut, Lebanon, in April, marking the first time one of Assad’s senior officials has talked with U.S. officials about Tice, the Post reported.

Hassan told the FBI he tried to dissuade Assad from having Tice killed but that the American was killed by a subordinate in 2013 after he had briefly escaped from his prison cell, The Post reported.

U.S. officials recovered a notice issued circulated to Syrian authorities in late October 2012 to be on the lookout for Tice, indicating he had escaped around that time.

Hassan told agents he advised Assad that Tice could be used as leverage in dealings with the U.S. and was more valuable alive than dead, sources told The Post.

Sources interviewed by The Post doubted that Hassan advised against Assad’s order and said it was more likely the senior Syrian official was trying to create “distance from his culpability.” The same source said the account of Assad ordering Tice’s killing appeared to be “credible.”

However, Marc Tice, Austin’s father, strongly disagrees, noting that Hassan is a “mass murderer who has denied many of the acts he is known to have committed,” Marc Tice told The Post. “I would not take his statements as the truth or consider them anything more than his effort to take care of himself.”

FBI agents told the Tice family in April they’d interviewed Hassan and shared with them a summary of the interview, the Tices told The Post.

Debra Tice, Austin’s mother, traveled to Beirut in May with the hopes of meeting with Hassan. “I wanted to talk to him as a mother, not as an interrogator,” she told The Post. The meeting did not happen.

Marc Tice told The Post the family believes Austin is still alive based on testimony from people who’ve come forward saying they saw Austin in prison after 2013. However, none of those accounts have produced hard evidence that Austin is still alive, according to U.S. officials.

The former Marine captain and freelancer for The Post disappeared near Damascus, Syria, in August 2012.

His family has worked tirelessly to find him and bring him home. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden each called Tice’s return a top priority but got nowhere with the former Syrian government. Syrian officials never admitted they had Tice nor provided proof he was alive, avoiding mentioning his name, U.S. officials told The Post.

After the Assad regime fell late last year and Assad and his family fled to Russia following a rapid rebel advance, the Tice family saw a chance to learn more. But as each of the regime’s prisons emptied, there was no evidence of Tice.

The new Syrian government has cooperated with the U.S. and the Tice family in trying to find him.

Following the fall of the regime, Hassan fled to Iran. He traveled to Beirut this spring, where the interviews with U.S. officials took place.

He gave descriptions of a site where Tice’s remains could be found, which have changed but remain near the Damascus area. FBI agents are trying to reach the locations described by Hassan to search for Tice’s remains.

“There is not anything, at least at this time, to corroborate what [Hassan] is saying,” one of the people familiar with the matter told The Post. “The flip side of it is, with his role in the regime, it’s hard to understand why he would want to lie about something like that.”

After being taken hostage in August 2012, Tice was first held in a car garage near Hassan’s office in southern Damascus, said Safwan Bahloul, who says he was a three-star general who worked in Syria’s external intelligence service, The Post reported.

U.S. officials did not know about Bahloul or his role until a recent interview in the Economist and have not yet corroborated his account, The Post reported.

Bahloul told the Economist that Hassan ordered him to interrogate Tice and gave him Tice’s iPhone. He was to find out if Tice was “merely a journalist” or “an American spy.”

Tice told Bahloul he was a former Marine working as a freelance journalist, Bahloul said. Tice was kept in handcuffs except during interviews.

Bahloul said Hassan ordered the filming of a video posted to YouTube in September 2012. U.S. officials determined early that Syrian government officials staged the clip to make it appear as though Tice were being held by Islamic militants, The Post reported.

Since 2016, the intelligence community has assessed, with low confidence, that Tice was alive. But, after the Assad regime fell, the CIA changed its assessment that Tice was likely dead, though also with low confidence.

There remains no hard evidence one way or the other to prove that Tice is alive or dead, officials told The Post.

The new Syrian government has pledged to help the Tice family search for their son. Roger Carstens, the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs, and Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, traveled to Damascus on Dec. 20 and were some of the first U.S. officials to meet with the new government.

“There’s been virtually no sign … of Austin,” Trump said in late March. “It’s been a long time. It’s been many, many years. He was in Syria and just disappeared off the face of the Earth. So, you know, a lot of bad things happen, but we will never — until we find out something definitive one way or the other — we will never stop looking for him.’’

Debra Tice visited Rome last week during the Catholic Church’s Jubilee, a year of reconciliation and renewal that takes place every 25 years. A cardinal in Syria arranged a short meeting with Pope Leo XIV.

She told The Post that the pope “gave me a very tender blessing about being a mother and being determined.”

This August will mark the 13th anniversary of Austin’s disappearance. Debra remains steadfast.

“I’m Austin’s mom,” she told The Post. “And my son is alive.”