{"id":820,"date":"2025-06-16T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T08:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/doctor-alaa-mousa-accused-of-burning-teen-boys-genitals-and-other-tortures-in-assads-syria-to-know-fate-as-german-court-wraps-up-trial\/"},"modified":"2025-06-16T08:00:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T08:00:17","slug":"doctor-alaa-mousa-accused-of-burning-teen-boys-genitals-and-other-tortures-in-assads-syria-to-know-fate-as-german-court-wraps-up-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/doctor-alaa-mousa-accused-of-burning-teen-boys-genitals-and-other-tortures-in-assads-syria-to-know-fate-as-german-court-wraps-up-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor Alaa Mousa, accused of burning teen boy\u2019s genitals and other tortures in Assad\u2019s Syria, to know fate as German court wraps up trial"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FRANKFURT, June 16 — A German court will rule Monday on the case of a Syrian doctor accused of crimes against humanity under former dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.<\/p>\n

Alaa Mousa, 40, is accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs on 18 occasions between 2011 and 2012, including setting fire to a teenage boy’s genitals.<\/p>\n

The accused is also alleged to have administered a lethal injection to a patient who had resisted being beaten, according to federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors have asked judges at the higher regional court in Frankfurt to hand down a life sentence in the case, which comes to a conclusion after Assad’s ouster in December.<\/p>\n

The accused denies all the charges against him.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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He continued to practise medicine in Germany, working as an orthopaedic doctor until he was arrested in June 2020.<\/p>\n

A former employer told German media they knew nothing of his past in Syria’s military hospitals, and that colleagues described him as someone who was “unremarkable”.<\/p>\n

Witness statements<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to prosecutors, Mousa worked at military hospitals in Homs and Damascus, where political opponents detained by the government were brought for treatment.<\/p>\n

Instead of receiving medical assistance, the patients were tortured and “not infrequently killed”, they said.<\/p>\n

In one case, Mousa is accused of pouring flammable liquid on a prisoner’s wounds before setting them on fire and kicking him in the face so hard that three of his teeth had to be replaced.<\/p>\n

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He also allegedly doused a teenage boy’s genitals in alcohol before setting them alight.<\/p>\n

Other inmates were kicked and beaten, sometimes with medical tools, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n

During the trial, the court heard testimony from colleagues and detainees, who said they recognised the accused, according to German weekly Der Spiegel.<\/p>\n

One former inmate said he had been forced to carry the bodies of patients who had died after they were injected by Mousa, Der Spiegel reported.<\/p>\n

Another witness said the military hospital where he was held in Damascus had been known as a “slaughterhouse”.<\/p>\n

At the opening of the trial in 2022, Mousa told the court he had witnessed beatings but denied striking patients himself.<\/p>\n

The accused however said he was too afraid of the military police “in control” at the hospital to speak out.<\/p>\n

“I felt sorry for them, but I couldn’t say anything, or it would have been me instead of the patient,” he said.<\/p>\n

Germany has tried several supporters of Assad’s regime under the legal principle of “universal jurisdiction”, which allows for serious crimes to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a different country.<\/p>\n

The first global trial over state-sponsored torture in Syria under the Assad government opened in Koblenz in 2020.<\/p>\n

The accused in the trial, a former army colonel, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in jail in 2022. — AFP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Doctor Alaa Mousa, accused of burning teen boy’s genitals and other tortures in Assad’s Syria, to know fate as German court wraps up trial<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FRANKFURT, June 16 — A German court will rule Monday on the case of a Syrian doctor accused of crimes against humanity under former dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Alaa Mousa, 40, is accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs on 18 occasions between 2011 and 2012, including setting fire to a…<\/p>\n

Read More “Doctor Alaa Mousa, accused of burning teen boy\u2019s genitals and other tortures in Assad\u2019s Syria, to know fate as German court wraps up trial”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":821,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}