“A Syrian doctor believed to have committed crimes against humanity, including torturing and killing prisoners in Syria’s military hospitals, went on trial on Wednesday in Frankfurt, Germany.
Alaa Mousa, 36, is the third Syrian official to stand trial for regime-backed crimes, after Anwar Raslan, a senior Syrian intelligence officer, was sentenced to life in prison last week in Koblenz, Germany.
According to Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), this could earn him a harsher sentence than that given to Anwar, who defected from Syria years before he was tried.
Ghany told Middle East Eye that the Syrian embassy in Berlin sent a lawyer to help the doctor in his defence, which suggests he is still connected to the Syrian government.
“We are expecting a life sentence,” he said.
Ghany was present at the trial in Frankfurt. At the entrance to the courtroom he placed the faces and stories of seven Syrian doctors who disappeared in Syria.
His organisation has made hundreds of illustrations of missing Syrian activists, but they deliberately chose those seven because they are doctors, explained Ghany.
“We wanted to show the difference between a slaughterhouse doctor who was torturing people and the other type of doctors who were helping injured protesters or calling for political change and democracy, only to get arrested by security forces,” he told MEE.
Both Ghany and Klein hope that Anwar’s conviction in Koblenz will set an example that will encourage other European states to open cases against Syrian war criminals.
“We want the court to condemn Alaa individually but also the Syrian regime itself,” said Ghany.”
