Germany tries Syrian doctor for crimes against humanity

FRANKFURT: German prosecutors accused a Syrian doctor on Wednesday of torturing detainees and killing one of them while working in military hospitals in his war-torn homeland, on the first day of a landmark crimes against humanity trial in Frankfurt.

The accused, 36-year-old Alaa Mousa, arrived in Germany in 2015 where he continued to practise medicine until his arrest. The trial at Frankfurt’s higher regional court is the second of its kind in Germany, and adds to other European efforts to hold loyalists of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to account for alleged war-era atrocities.

Mousa faces 18 counts of torturing detainees at military hospitals in Homs and Damascus in 2011-12, including setting fire to a teenage boy’s genitals. He also faces one count of murder, for having allegedly administered a lethal injection to a prisoner who resisted being beaten.

The accused helped to perpetrate "a systematic attack on the civilian population," said federal prosecutor Anna Zabeck as she read out the charge sheet.

He "tortured detainees by inflicting substantial bodily harm on them", she told the court. The defendant, who wore a blue suit and an FFP2 face mask in court, kept his head down while the charges were being read out.

He has denied the allegations. His trial comes after another German court last week sentenced a former Syrian colonel to life in jail for overseeing the murder of 27 people and the torture of 4,000 others at a Damascus detention centre a decade ago.

That verdict, hailed by victims as "historic", marked the culmination of the first trial globally over state-sponsored torture in Syria. The proceedings in Germany are made possible by the legal principle of "universal jurisdiction" -- which allows countries to try people for crimes of exceptional gravity, including war crimes and genocide, even if they were committed in a different country.

Other cases involving the Syrian conflict have also sprung up in France, Norway, Sweden and Austria. "Over the past decade, a large amount of evidence about atrocities in Syria has been collected, and now... those efforts are starting to bear fruit," said Balkees Jarrah of Human Rights Watch.