Life sentence handed to Alaa Mousa highlights the ‘brutality of Assad’s dictatorial, unjust regime’.
A German court docket has handed down a life sentence to a Syrian physician convicted of committing acts of torture as a part of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on dissent.
The Frankfurt Larger Regional Court docket imposed the sentence on Alaa Mousa on Monday, ruling that the physician’s actions shaped a part of the Assad regime’s “inhumane and repressive” marketing campaign in opposition to opposition figures.
The court docket had discovered the 40-year-old responsible of crimes in opposition to humanity, together with homicide and torture, in reference to acts dedicated throughout Syria’s civil warfare between 2011 and 2012.
Presiding decide Christoph Koller mentioned the decision underscored the “brutality of Assad’s dictatorial, unjust regime”.
The trial, which ran for greater than three years, was some of the important instances introduced underneath Germany’s precept of common jurisdiction, which permits critical crimes dedicated overseas to be prosecuted domestically.
Mousa was accused of torturing sufferers at navy hospitals in Damascus and Homs, the place political prisoners have been frequently introduced for supposed remedy, on 18 events.
He had denied the fees through the trial, which got here to a detailed months after al-Assad was deposed in December 2024.
‘Slaughterhouse’
Prosecutors mentioned fairly than receiving medical remedy, detainees have been as an alternative subjected to horrific abuse, with some dying consequently.
Witnesses described quite a few acts of extreme cruelty, together with Mousa pouring flammable liquid on a prisoner’s wounds earlier than setting them alight and kicking the person within the face, shattering his enamel.
In one other incident, the physician was accused of injecting a detainee with a deadly substance for refusing to be overwhelmed.
One former prisoner described the Damascus hospital the place he was held as a “slaughterhouse”.
Mousa arrived in Germany in 2015 on a skilled-worker visa and continued practising medication as an orthopaedic physician till his arrest in 2020. Colleagues reportedly mentioned they’d no data of his previous, with one describing him as “unremarkable”.
Throughout the trial, which opened in 2022, Mousa denied personally harming sufferers however admitted witnessing abuse.
He claimed he was powerless to intervene, saying: “I felt sorry for them, however I couldn’t say something, or it will have been me as an alternative of the affected person.”
