A Syrian doctor has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in his home country—including murder and torture—by a German court. The 40-year-old man, Alaa Mousa, worked as a junior doctor in an army hospital and a military intelligence prison in Homs and Damascus in Syria, in 2011 and 2012, in the early phase of the civil war.
He abused prisoners accused of being members of the opposition and who were considered enemies of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad who had participated in the uprisings against the regime during the Arab spring. He was convicted by the court in Frankfurt of two deaths and eight cases of severe torture. The court imposed the highest possible sentence on the man, a supporter of Assad, whose crimes—including war crimes, torture and murder—the judge, Christoph Koller, said had “seriously injured nine people, both physically and mentally, and killed two”.
Witnesses called to give evidence during the almost three-and-a-half-year trial described, sometimes in considerable detail, the severe abuse they had received at the hands of Mousa. Koller praised the more than 50 witnesses who he said had possessed the courage to share the descriptions of their suffering with the court, sometimes over several days. He said without them the case could not have been brought successfully. During her summing up, the senior public prosecutor Anna Zabeck emphasized to the court last month the difficult circumstances under which the witnesses had testified. Both they and their relatives living in Syria were repeatedly threatened and intimidated to prevent them from appearing at the trial, she said.
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