On Wednesday, NBC News released a revision of its account of the 2012 kidnapping in Syria of its foreign correspondent Richard Engel, saying it was likely that he was captured by a Sunni militant group, not forces affiliated with the government of President Bashar al-Assad as had been previously reported.
NBC said that its review of the incident was prompted by reporting form The New York Times, and station officials were led to conclude that "the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia," but that the group "put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite shabiha militiamen,"
the Times reported.
Engel and his team were kidnapped in December 2012 while reporting in Syria. They were held for five days until their release. Within hours of emerging, they appeared on the "Today" show to talk about their ordeal.
"This was a group known as the shabiha, this was the government militia, these are people who are loyal to President Bashar al-Assad," Engel said on "Today," based on information he said he got from the group. He also said in other accounts that he had been rescued by Sunni rebels, and that at least two people died while they were in captivity.
The Times interviewed several dozen people, it reported, including many of those involved in the search for the team, rebel fighters, activists in Syria, and current and former NBC News employees. There was a consensus that Engel's team was almost certainly detained by a Sunni criminal unit associated with the Free Syrian Army, a loose alliance of rebels opposed to Assad.
NBC had been informed during and after the event that the captors were likely Sunnis, but the network moved swiftly to put Engel on air with the account of the Shiite captors without presenting the alternative version it had been told.
NBC News did not offer a statement beyond the
account given by Engel on the website Wednesday.
In his statement, Engel said he did not have a "definitive account of what happened that night," and acknowledged that he had received conflicting information.
He also changed a number of other details of his account. In a Vanity Fair article he had said he saw one of his captors lying dead, but in his account Wednesday he said he did not see bodies during the rescue.
There were also discrepancies in the account of how they exited the vehicle that was holding them, the Times reported.
The admissions come just two months after NBC News anchor Brian Williams was suspended for exaggerating his account of flying in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003. It resulted in a shake-up of the network's news division and an ongoing investigation into the matter.
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