A former member of ousted Syrian leader Bashar al Assad's inner circle is reportedly claiming U.S. Marine veteran and American freelance journalist Austin Tice was executed at the 2013 order of Assad.

The BBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times are reporting the FBI and CIA's investigation into Tice's whereabouts have come from Syrian insider Bassam al Hassan during interviews in Beirut over several days in April, but the mother of Tice believes the Assad operative is merely telling the U.S. a story.

"I am his mother, I still believe that my son is alive and that he will walk free," Debra Tice told the BBC as the 13th anniversary of her son's disappearance approaches.

Being rebuffed in her request, Debra Tice had sought permission from the U.S. embassy in Beirut to talk to al Hassan herself, because she believes he "fed the FBI a story that they wanted to hear" in order to close the case, BBC reported.

"I just want to be able to speak to him as a mother and ask him about my son," she told the BBC in May after being briefed by U.S. officials from the Hassan interview.

Debra Tice's optimism reflected the belief of former President Joe Biden in December 2024 that Tice was still alive in a Syrian prison.

"We believe he's alive," Biden told reporters in December before leaving office and amid the fall of the Assad regime. "We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet."

But President Donald Trump's efforts to open diplomacy with the new Syrian leadership now has reportedly found that Assad had ordered Tice executed about a dozen years ago and roughly one year after he went missing in 2012.

Tice was killed by a subordinate in 2013 after he had briefly escaped his prison cell, Hassan told the FBI, according to BBC sources.

"Based on firsthand information, the Tice family believes this version of events is false and it is unhelpful to their efforts to locate and safely return Austin," the family told The New York Times in a statement.

Father Marc Tice says Hassan has reason to lie, calling Hassan – allegedly behind the use of chemical weapons attacks in Syria – a "mass murderer who has denied many of the acts that he is known to have committed," he 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."

Both the FBI and CIA declined to comment to the Post on the report and Austin Tice's whereabouts, with the FBI only saying it was "steadfast in our determination to locate and bring home hostages or their remains to their families."

Hassan reportedly has given the FBI a potential location of Austin Tice's remains in the Damascus area and there are efforts to vet that information, the Post reported.

"There is not anything, at least at this time, to corroborate what [Hassan] is saying," a source 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."