A German court has handed down a life sentence to a Syrian doctor convicted of committing acts of torture as part of  Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on dissent.

The Frankfurt Higher Regional Court imposed the sentence on Alaa Mousa on Monday, ruling that the doctor’s actions formed part of the Assad regime’s “inhumane and repressive” campaign against opposition figures.

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The court had found the 40-year-old guilty of crimes against humanity, including murder and torture, in connection with acts committed during Syria’s civil war between 2011 and 2012.

Presiding judge Christoph Koller said the verdict underscored the “brutality of Assad’s dictatorial, unjust regime”.

The trial, which ran for more than three years, was one of the most significant cases brought under Germany’s principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows serious crimes committed abroad to be prosecuted domestically.

Mousa was accused of torturing patients at military hospitals in Damascus and Homs, where political prisoners were regularly brought for supposed treatment, on 18 occasions.

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He had denied the charges during the trial, which came to a close months after al-Assad was deposed in December 2024.

‘Slaughterhouse’

Prosecutors said rather than receiving medical treatment, detainees were instead subjected to horrific abuse, with some dying as a result.

Witnesses described numerous acts of severe cruelty, including Mousa pouring flammable liquid on a prisoner’s wounds before setting them alight and kicking the man in the face, shattering his teeth.

In another incident, the doctor was accused of injecting a detainee with a fatal substance for refusing to be beaten.

One former prisoner described the Damascus hospital where he was held as a “slaughterhouse”.

Mousa arrived in Germany in 2015 on a skilled-worker visa and continued practising medicine as an orthopaedic doctor until his arrest in 2020. Colleagues reportedly said they had no knowledge of his past, with one describing him as “unremarkable”.

During the trial, which opened in 2022, Mousa denied personally harming patients but admitted witnessing abuse.

He claimed he was powerless to intervene, saying: “I felt sorry for them, but I couldn’t say anything, or it would have been me instead of the patient.”