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German court sentences Syrian doctor to life in jail for crimes against humanity German court sentences Syrian doctor to life in jail for crimes against humanity
(about 2 hours later)
Alaa Mousa was accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals during Syrian civil war, under former ruler Bashar al-Assad Alaa M accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals during Syrian civil war under former ruler Bashar al-Assad
A German court has sentenced a Syrian doctor to life in prison for crimes against humanity for torturing detainees at military hospitals under the former ruler Bashar al-Assad. A Syrian doctor has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in his home country – including murder and torture – by a German court.
The crimes committed by Alaa Mousa, 40, during the Syrian civil war were “part of a brutal reaction by Assad’s dictatorial, unjust regime”, said the presiding judge at the higher regional court in Frankfurt, Christoph Koller. The 40-year-old man, whose identity was only disclosed as Alaa M, worked as a junior doctor in an army hospital and a military intelligence prison in Homs and Damascus in Syria, in 2011 and 2012, in the early phase of the civil war.
Mousa was accused of torturing patients at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs on 18 occasions between 2011 and 2012. He abused prisoners accused of being members of the opposition and who were considered enemies of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad who had participated in the uprisings against the regime during the Arab spring. He was convicted by the court in Frankfurt am Main of two deaths and eight cases of severe torture.
In one instance, he was said to have set fire to the genitals of a teenage boy and, in another case, to have delivered a lethal injection to a detainee who resisted a beating. The court imposed the highest possible sentence on the man, a supporter of Assad, whose crimes – including war crimes, torture and murder – the judge, Christoph Koller, said had “seriously injured nine people, both physically and mentally, and killed two”.
As well as crimes against humanity, the court found Mousa guilty of murder, torture and war crimes. He described the doctor, based on one of several experts’ reports, as having a “sadistic” nature that was given particular expression when he tortured his victims.
Mousa denied the charges in the trial, which came to a close months after Assad was deposed in December 2024. “Above all, the accused enjoyed harming people that he considered inferior and of lower value to himself,” Koller said.
Mousa arrived in Germany in 2015 on a visa for highly skilled workers at the same time as hundreds of thousands of Syrians who were fleeing the civil war at home. Witnesses called to give evidence during the almost three-and-a-half-year trial described, sometimes in considerable detail, the severe abuse they had received at the hands of Alaa M, including beatings and kickings, or how he deliberately set broken bones with insufficient levels of anaesthetic. They also told the court how the doctor had poured flammable liquid on their wounds and parts of their body – and in two cases, including that of a 14-year-old boy, on their genitals – and set them on fire. He injected one prisoner with a deadly poison while the man had been trying to defend himself. He died in front of fellow prisoners.
He continued to practise medicine in Germany, working as an orthopaedic doctor until he was arrested in June 2020. The court also heard how he had beaten and kicked a young man suffering from epileptic seizures, knowing he had the condition, which led to it worsening. He later administered a pill, which caused the man to die in the presence of his brother.
A former employer told German media they knew nothing of his past in Syria’s military hospitals, and that colleagues described him as “unremarkable”. Koller praised the more than 50 witnesses who he said had possessed the courage to share the descriptions of their suffering with the court, sometimes over several days. Without them the case could not have been brought successfully, he said.
According to prosecutors, Mousa worked at military hospitals in Homs and Damascus, where political opponents detained by the government were brought for treatment. Instead of receiving medical assistance, the patients were tortured and “not infrequently killed”, they said. During her summing up, the senior public prosecutor Anna Zabeck emphasised to the court last month the difficult circumstances under which the witnesses had testified. Both they and their relatives living in Syria were repeatedly threatened and intimidated to prevent them from appearing at the trial, she said.
In one case, Mousa was accused of pouring flammable liquid on a prisoner’s wounds before setting them on fire and kicking him in the face so hard that three of his teeth had to be replaced. She said the witnesses had been “asked to give almost everything during their testimony”, by discussing the violence that had scarred them “physically and mentally”. The prosecutor Christina Schlepp added that, despite repeated accusations from the defence lawyers that the victims had been part of a conspiracy against the doctor, there were “no signs they had wanted to incriminate” Alaa M for the sake of it.
During the trial, the court heard testimony from colleagues and detainees. One witness said the military hospital where he was held in Damascus had been known as a “slaughterhouse”. During the often hours-long court sessions, Alaa M mainly sat in the dock with his head bowed, and repeatedly had to blow his nose.
At the opening of the trial in 2022, Mousa told the court he had seen beatings but denied striking patients himself. Alaa M has lived in Germany for 10 years. He worked in various clinics over five years as an orthopaedic medic, most recently at a hospital in Bad Wildungen in the state of Hessen, in western Germany, until his arrest in summer 2020. He was recognised and reported to authorities after some of his victims saw him in a TV documentary about the Syrian city of Homs and was placed in custody. The court case against him at Frankfurt’s higher regional court started in January 2022 and took place over nearly 190 days.
The accused, however, said he was too afraid of the military police “in control” at the hospital to speak out. “I felt sorry for them but I couldn’t say anything, or it would have been me instead of the patient,” he said. It was possible to try the doctor in a German court even though the crimes were committed in Syria due to the principal of universal jurisdiction in international criminal law. This allows for the prosecution anywhere of a person alleged to have committed war crimes.
The federal prosecutor’s office had asked for the man to receive life imprisonment – which usually runs to a maximum of 15 years in Germany – followed by preventive detention – meaning he would always stay behind bars, because of the potential danger it considered him to pose to wider society should he ever be released.
Lawyers acting for the doctor called for him to be acquitted on the charge of the two killings, arguing that he had not been working in Homs at the time they took place.
The doctor, who entered court wearing a black fur-trimmed hooded coat to cover his face, pleaded not guilty, insisting he had been the victim of a conspiracy.
The verdict has yet to be confirmed.