A German court on Monday handed a life sentence to a Syrian doctor who tortured opponents of former ruler Bashar al-Assad during the country's brutal civil war.
The higher regional court in Frankfurt found Alaa Mousa, 40, guilty of crimes against humanity, committed while working as a doctor at military hospitals in Homs and Damascus between 2011 and 2012.
Mousa's actions were "part of a brutal reaction by Assad's dictatorial, unjust regime", presiding judge Christoph Koller said as he read out the verdict.
Germany has tried several Assad supporters under the legal principle of "universal jurisdiction", which allows for serious crimes to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a different country.
Syria's civil war erupted in 2011 after Assad's repression of anti-government protests, sparking a spiralling conflict that drew in regional actors and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Mousa had "wanted to punish actual or suspected opponents of the regime, while at the same time taking pleasure in torturing them", the court said in a statement.
Among the accusations made against him were that he had mutilated patients' genitals, beaten them with medical equipment and delivered a lethal injection to one.
Mousa covered his head with a hood as he entered the court on Monday and looked at the table in front of him as the sentence was read out.
He denied the accusations made against him in the trial. Mousa's lawyer Ulrich Enders said he intended to appeal the decision.
- 'Slaughterhouse' -
According to federal 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".
On two occasions, Mousa was accused of pouring a flammable liquid on a prisoner's genitals before setting them on fire. In one case, the victim was a teenager "aged 14 or 15 years old".
He was also said to have performed surgery on a detainee without anaesthesia and "intentionally killed a resisting prisoner by means of a lethal injection", according to the court.
Another patient with epilepsy was administered a lethal pill by the defendant and died.
During the trial, the court heard testimony from some 50 witnesses, including former colleagues of Mousa and detainees at the military hospitals, the court said.
One former inmate said he had been forced to carry the bodies of patients who died after being injected by Mousa, German weekly Der Spiegel reported.
Another witness said the military hospital where he was held in Damascus had been known as a "slaughterhouse", Der Spiegel said.
At the opening of the trial in 2022, Mousa told the court he had witnessed beatings but had been scared 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.
- 'Witnesses threatened' -
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 at home.
He continued to practise medicine in Germany, working as an orthopaedic doctor until he was arrested in June 2020.
The verdict in the trial came just a few months after Assad was ousted in December 2024 at the culmination of a lightning offensive by a rebel coalition led by Islamists.
Up to that point, the Assad government had "attempted to influence" the proceedings in Frankfurt, judge Koller said.
Confidential information was passed to Syria "so that relatives of witnesses were threatened" and "probably even abducted", he said.
The first global trial over state-sponsored torture in Syria under the Assad government opened in 2020 at a court in the western German city of Koblenz.
The accused in the trial, a former army colonel, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in jail in 2022.
