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 rulerBashar al-Assad.
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.
Mousa was accused of torturing patients at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs on 18 occasions between 2011 and 2012.
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.
As well as crimes against humanity, the court found Mousa guilty of murder, torture and war crimes.
Mousa denied the charges in the trial, which came to a close months after Assad was deposed in December 2024.
Mousa arrived inGermanyin 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.
He continued to practise medicine in Germany, working as an orthopaedic doctor until he was arrested in June 2020.
A former employer told German media they knew nothing of his past in Syria’s military hospitals, and that colleagues described him as “unremarkable”.
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.
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.
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”.
At the opening of the trial in 2022, Mousa told the court he had seen beatings but denied striking patients himself.
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.