CNN

Steven Sotloff Set Up for ISIS Capture: Family Spokesman

A spokesman for the family of slain journalist Steven Sotloff claims the Miami man was set up in an elaborate plan to kidnap him at the Syrian border.

Sotloff was betrayed by people he was supposed to trust, rebels who were paid as much as $50,000 by ISIS, spokesman Barak Barfi said in an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" Monday night.

According to Barfi, the day Sotloff was taken there had to be someone watching him who called ISIS to tell them he was on the way.

"It happened so quickly that when he was kidnapped they didn’t have the time to mobilize those resources," Barfi said. "Somebody at the border crossing made a phone call to ISIS and they set up a fake check point with many people and Steven and his people could not escape."

Sotloff, a Miami native who freelanced for Time and Foreign Policy magazines and studied journalism at the University of Central Florida, was killed by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS in a video released earlier this month. He had vanished a year ago in Syria and was not seen again until he appeared in the recent ISIS video that showed fellow journalist James Foley's beheading.

In the CNN interview, Barfi also claims there was little communication between the federal government and the Sotloff family, and claimed sometimes they wouldn't hear anything for months. He also called the relationship between the family and the White House "very strained."

"We do not believe they gave us the cooperation (the family needed)," Barfi said.

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