German court jails Syrian doctor for crimes against humanity

Alaa Mousa was found guilty of torturing patients at military hospitals

Alaa Mousa is brought into court to hear the verdict in his case. AFP

A German court on Monday sentenced a Syrian doctor to life in prison for crimes against humanity after he tortured prisoners at military hospitals under former president Bashar Al Assad's regime.

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 Christoph Koller, the presiding judge at the higher regional court in Frankfurt.

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 burnt the genitals of a teenage boy and in another case, to have killed a detainee who resisted a beating with an injection.

As well as crimes against humanity, the court found Mousa guilty of murder, torture and war crimes.

The defendant denied the charges in the trial, which came to a close a few months after Mr Al Assad was overthrown in December 2024.

Mousa arrived in Germany in 2015 on a visa for highly skilled workers at the same time as hundreds of thousands of Syrians were fleeing the civil war.

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's patients – often political opponents detained by the government – were tortured and "not infrequently killed".

In one case, he 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 were lost.

Other inmates were kicked and beaten, sometimes with medical tools, according to prosecutors.

A torn portrait of Bashar Al Assad inside the Presidential Palace, in Damascus. Getty Images

During the trial, the court heard testimony from colleagues and detainees, who said they recognised the accused, according to German weekly Der Spiegel.

One former inmate said he had been forced to carry the bodies of patients who died after Mousa's lethal injections, Der Spiegel reported.

Another 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 witnessed beatings, but denied striking patients.

The accused 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.

Germany has tried several supporters of Mr Al Assad's regime under the legal principle of "universal jurisdiction", which allows for serious crimes to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a different country.

The first global trial over state-sponsored torture in Syria under the Assad government opened in 2020 in Koblenz, in western Germany.

The accused in the trial, a former army colonel, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in jail in 2022.