CORRECTION

Engel Revises Account of 2012 Kidnapping

Sunnis, not Shia, behind NBC crew’s 2012 capture.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel has changed his account of his own 2012 kidnapping in Syria, where he and five other NBC News crew members were held captive by gunmen for five days. Upon re-reporting the story, Engel says his team discovered that the gunmen were Sunni, not Shia, and that the group that freed them had ties to the kidnappers, according to a statement posted online. Engel initially believed the captors were Shia militiamen, but was prompted by a The New York Times report to reconsider the account. The Times found that the NBC team was reportedly taken by a Sunni criminal gang affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, and not forces linked to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.