A former senior Syrian security official has told the FBI that American freelance journalist Austin Tice was killed in 2013 on the orders of President Bashar al-Assad, an account that has not been corroborated by the United States but marks the first time a senior official in the Assad regime has spoken to U.S. officials about Tice’s fate.

The U.S. government is investigating the claims made by Bassam al-Hassan, a member of Assad’s inner circle and his adviser for strategic affairs, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Hassan was interviewed in Beirut by the FBI and the CIA over several days in April.

The FBI had no comment on the matter, citing the ongoing investigation, and said it remains “steadfast in our determination to locate and bring home hostages or their remains to their families.” The CIA declined to comment.

Details of Hassan’s account were first reported by the BBC.

The former Assad aide told the FBI in the presence of Lebanese officials that Assad ordered him to have Tice killed, and that he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Assad, according to U.S. officials and one other person familiar with the matter.

Hassan told the FBI that he had Tice killed by a subordinate, and that it occurred in 2013, said the officials and people familiar with the matter. The order came at some point after Tice briefly escaped from his prison cell, they said.

In recent years, U.S. officials recovered a notice circulated to Syrian security authorities to be on the lookout for Tice. The notice was issued in late October 2012 — a date not previously revealed publicly — which indicates he had escaped around that time, they said. It was considered proof that the Syrian government held him, despite its official denials.

Hassan said he advised Assad that Tice, whose plight was of concern to the White House, could be used as leverage with the U.S. and was more valuable alive than dead, according to the officials and one person familiar with the matter.

Whether Hassan actually tried to push back is doubtful, said a second person familiar with the matter. It is more likely he was trying to create “distance from his culpability,” the person said, adding that the portion of his account about Assad ordering Tice’s killing appeared “credible.”

Marc Tice, Austin Tice’s father, vehemently disagreed. Hassan is a “mass murderer who has denied many of the acts that he is known to have committed,” Marc Tice told The Washington 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 informed Tice’s parents, Marc and Debra, in April that they had interviewed Hassan, and gave them a summary of the exchange, the Tices said.

In early May, Debra Tice traveled to Beirut in the hopes of meeting with Hassan. “I wanted to talk to him as a mother, not as an interrogator,” she said. The meeting did not materialize.

Hassan has not responded to a request for comment sent through a close relative, nor to an email associated with him. The relative confirmed that he was briefly in Lebanon, but said he has since left the country.

Marc Tice said the family believes that their son is still alive, based on testimony from people who have come forward over the years saying they had seen Austin in prison in Syria in the years after 2013. None of those alleged sightings have produced hard proof that Austin Tice is alive, according to U.S. officials.

A onetime Marine captain and a freelancer for The Washington Post during the early years of Syria’s brutal civil war, Tice, then 31, vanished in August 2012 near Damascus.

Ever since, his family has worked desperately to find him and bring him home. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden all made Tice’s return a top priority, only to be stonewalled by the former Syrian government, which never admitted holding him or provided proof that he was alive — and avoided even mentioning his name, U.S. officials said.

Assad, his family and senior members of his regime fled to Russia in early December.

When the Assad regime crumbled late last year after a whirlwind rebel advance, the Tice family saw an opening at last. But as the regime’s notorious prisons emptied, there was no sign of Tice. The new Syrian government, led by former militant Ahmed al-Sharaa — formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — has cooperated with U.S. and Tice family efforts to locate him.

Hassan, who was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2014 over his association with Syria’s chemical weapons program, fled to Iran shortly before the Assad regime fell in December, according to U.S. officials. He traveled this spring to Beirut, where he has relatives, they said. He is wanted by the Sharaa government.

Hassan gave FBI agents descriptions of the location where Tice’s remains could be found. Those descriptions have shifted somewhat, but are always in the Damascus area, one of the officials said.

The FBI is trying to reach those locations to search for the remains.

“There is not anything, at least at this time, to corroborate what [Hassan] is saying,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “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.”

Hassan did have Tice in his custody, another former Syrian official told The Post in an interview.

After Tice’s capture in August 2012, he was initially held in a makeshift prison on the premises of a car garage down the street from Hassan’s office in southern Damascus, said Safwan Bahloul, who said he was a three-star general who worked in Syria’s external intelligence service.

U.S. officials were not aware of Bahloul until a recent interview published in the Economist, and have not corroborated his account, said one official.

Bahloul, who speaks fluent English and has lived in Britain, said Hassan tasked him with interrogating Tice and gave him the American’s iPhone. His job, Bahloul said, was to find out if Tice was “merely a journalist” or “an American spy.”

Tice insisted he was a former Marine working as a freelance journalist, Bahloul said. Tice was well-treated but kept in handcuffs, which Bahloul asked to be removed during their interrogation sessions over three days, he said. The questioning had lighter moments, with chitchat about country music icon Johnny Cash, Bahloul said.

Bahloul also said Hassan arranged the filming of a video posted on YouTube in September 2012. U.S. intelligence officials determined early on that the clip was staged by government officials to make it seem as if Tice were being held by Islamic militants.

Since at least 2016, the intelligence community had assessed, though with low confidence, that Tice was alive. However, after Assad was toppled and weeks went by with no breakthroughs, the CIA changed its assessment, saying he was probably dead, but again, with low confidence.

There remains an absence of hard proof one way or the other, U.S. officials say.

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

Carstens was allowed to visit one site — Hassan’s compound. The FBI swabbed for DNA. Carstens took pictures. Nothing conclusive has turned up.

“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.’’

Last week, Debra Tice, who converted to Catholicism in 2000, visited Rome on the occasion of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee, a year of reconciliation and renewal that takes place every quarter century. A friend, a cardinal in Syria, arranged a brief meeting with the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff.

The pope “gave me a very tender blessing about being a mother and being determined,” she told The Post.

She said she asked him if he was willing to speak with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and ask them to speak to Assad about her son.

As the 13th anniversary of his disappearance approaches, Debra Tice remains resolute.

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

Joby Warrick and Mohamed el Chamaa contributed to this report.

previous coverage

• Austin Tice’s family claims US had knowledge of journalist’s location in Syria for years
• Trump says ‘no sign’ of missing journalist and Marine veteran Austin Tice, but US won’t stop looking
• Mother of journalist Austin Tice visits Syria for clues to son’s fate