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 40-year-old man, whose identity was only disclosed as Alaa Mousa, 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.
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 of two deaths and eight cases of severe torture.
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”.
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.
“Above all, the accused enjoyed harming people that he considered inferior and of lower value to himself,” Koller said.
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 Mousa, 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.
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.
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. He said without them the case could not have been brought successfully.
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.
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” Mousa for the sake of it.
During the often hours-long court sessions, Mousa mainly sat in the dock with his head bowed, and repeatedly had to blow his nose.
Mousa 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 the 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.
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.
