On Monday, the German court imposed a lifelong prison sentence to a Syrian doctor for crimes against humanity. During the reign of the now deposited Syrian President Bashar Assad in military hospitals, the doctor Alaa Musus was tortured by patients. According to the AFP report, TASR reports this.
A judge of the court in Frankfurt, Christoph Koller, said that the 40-year-old Musú during the Syrian civil war committed crimes that were part of the “brutal reaction of Assad’s dictatorial, unfair regime”.
Torture and murder
In addition to crimes against humanity, the court acknowledged Musa as guilty of murder, torture and war crimes.
From 2011 to 2012, a Syrian doctor in hospitals in Homs and Damascus tortured imprisoned civilians, opponents of President Assad, whom he beat with batons, kicked and caused them other injuries, sometimes with medical devices. According to the prosecutors, he also caused burns on the teenage genitalia and gave a deadly injection to a patient who defended the beating.
Allegations and arrest
The prosecutor’s office blamed him for killing one person, 18 cases of torture, severe bodily harm and causing serious psychological harm, as well as other crimes, including one who led to the death of another person.
Musa arrived in Germany in 2015 on the basis of work visas for highly qualified employees at a time when hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled from a civil war in their homeland. Until 2020 he worked as an orthopedic surgeon in Germany. The police detained him after the testimonies of Syrian witnesses in June 2020. He rejects all allegations.
Testimony in court
The German weekly Der Spiegel informed that his colleagues and also persons who were detained in Syria had testified in the court and said they met the Mus. One of the former prisoners said he was forced to wear the bodies of patients who died after he was injected with a deadly substance. Another witness said that the military hospital in Damascus, where he was detained, was known as a “slaughterhouse”.
At the beginning of the trial in 2022, he said he was witnessing battles, but he refused to beat patients. He claimed that he was afraid of a military police that checked hospitals and therefore did not talk about events in medical facilities.
Universal jurisdiction
In Germany, several persons have already been prosecuted by the suspects of committing crimes during the Syrian civil war, based on the principle of the so -called. universal jurisdiction that allows to prosecute abroad persons accused of serious crimes.
Even after the fall of Assad of 8 December 2024, Berlin undertook to continue prosecution of persons suspected of crimes committed during the Civil War in Syria. He promised to bring all Assad’s followers to the court to leave in Germany.
