A German court has sentenced a Syrian doctor to life in prison for committing crimes against humanity by torturing detainees at military hospitals during the regime of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The verdict, delivered on Monday, June 16, by the higher regional court in Frankfurt, marks a major milestone in the pursuit of accountability for atrocities committed during Syria’s civil war.
The convicted doctor, Alaa Mousa, 40, was found guilty of murder, torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in connection with his role at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs between 2011 and 2012. The court concluded that his acts were part of what presiding judge Christoph Koller described as “a brutal reaction by Assad’s dictatorial, unjust regime.”
According to the prosecution, Mousa tortured patients on 18 occasions. In one harrowing case, he set fire to a teenage boy’s genitals. In another, he delivered a fatal injection to a detainee who had resisted being beaten. Witnesses also testified that he poured flammable liquid on a prisoner’s wounds before igniting them and that he kicked the same victim in the face so violently that three of his teeth had to be replaced.
The trial featured testimony from former detainees and colleagues who identified Mousa as a participant in a system of systematic abuse. One former inmate recounted being forced to carry bodies of fellow prisoners who had died after Mousa injected them. Another said the military hospital where he was held had earned the nickname “slaughterhouse.”
Mousa denied the charges, claiming he had only witnessed beatings and was too afraid of the military police to intervene. “I felt sorry for them, but I couldn’t say anything, or it would have been me instead of the patient,” he told the court during proceedings that began in 2022.
The conviction comes months after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and is part of Germany’s ongoing effort to prosecute international crimes under the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction. This principle allows courts to try serious offences such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, regardless of where they occurred.
Mousa entered Germany in 2015 under a visa program for highly skilled workers and worked as an orthopaedic doctor until his arrest in 2020. Colleagues and former employers reportedly had no knowledge of his past in Syria’s military health system, describing him as “unremarkable.”
Germany has become a key jurisdiction for prosecuting crimes linked to Syria’s conflict. In 2022, a former Syrian colonel was also sentenced to life imprisonment in the city of Koblenz, marking the conclusion of the world’s first trial on state-sponsored torture under Assad’s regime.
