Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy in Libya Gregory Hicks revealed his staff received phone calls from individuals claiming to have Ambassador Christopher Stevens in their custody the night of the Benghazi attack Wednesday in the OGR Benghazi hearings.
The calls, Hicks said, were not taken credibly as they knew independently that Ambassador Stevens was in a hospital.
Hicks claimed this was most likely Ansar al-Sharia attempting to bait the rescue team into a trap:
GREGORY HICKS: [...] After the announcement of Chris's passing military escort and vehicles arrived at the airport. So the decision was made for them to go to the annex. one of the, before I got the call from the prime minister we had received several phone calls on the phone that had been with the ambassador saying that we know where the ambassador is. Please, you can come get him. And our local staff engaged on those phone calls admirably. Asking very, very good, outstanding even open-ended questions about where was he? Trying to discern whether he was alive, whether they even had the ambassador, whether that person was with the ambassador. Send a picture. Could we talk to the ambassador? Because we knew separately from David that the ambassador was in a hospital. That we believe was under Ansar al-Sharia's call. We suspected we were being baited into a trap and so we did not want to go send our people into an ambush. And we didn't. We sent them to the annex. [...]