The life imprisonment delivered to Alaa Mousa highlights the “brutality of the dictatorial and unfair regime of Assad”.
A German court has transmitted a life imprisonment to a Syrian doctor convicted of committing acts of torture as part of the brutal repression of Bashar al-Assad against dissent.
The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt imposed the sentence to Alaa Mousa on Monday, stating that the doctor's actions were part of the “inhuman and repressive” campaign of the Assad regime against opposition figures.
The court had found the culprit of 40 years of crimes against humanity, including murder and torture, in relation to the acts committed during the Civil War of Syria between 2011 and 2012.
Judge President Christoph Koller said the verdict stressed the “brutality of the dictatorial and unfair regime of Assad.”
The trial, which extended for more than three years, was one of the most important cases presented under the principle of universal jurisdiction of Germany, which allows serious crimes committed abroad to be processed nationwide.
Mousa was accused of torturing patients in military hospitals in Damascus and Homs, where political prisoners were brought regularly of course treatment, 18 times.
He had denied the charges during the trial, which reached an end of the months after Al-Assad was deposed in December 2024.
'Slaughterhouse'
Prosecutors said that, instead of receiving medical treatment, the detainees were subjected to horrible abuse, and as a result Moriban.
The witnesses described numerous acts of severe cruelty, including Mousa pouring flammable fluid on the wounds of a prisoner before lighting and kicking the man in his face, destroying his teeth.
In another incident, the doctor was accused of injecting a detainee with a fatal substance for refusing to be defeated.
A former prisoner described the Damascus hospital where he was retained as a “slaughterhouse.”
Mousa arrived in Germany in 2015 with a visa of qualified workers and continued to practice medicine as an orthopedic doctor until his arrest in 2020. According to reports, colleagues said they were not aware of their past, and one described it as “not notable.”
During the trial, which opened in 2022, Mousa denied personally harming patients, but admitted to having witnessed abuse.
He said he was not helpless to intervene, saying: “I felt sorry for them, but I couldn't say anything, or I would have been instead of the patient.”
