War crimes: lifelong imprisonment in torture process against Syrian doctor

A doctor in Frankfurt has been sentenced to life imprisonment for fatal torture and war crimes in his Syrian homeland. At the same time, the Higher Regional Court determined the special severity of the guilt, which an early release from prison in practice in practice.

The accused was convicted of a total of eleven cases, so he was seriously injured nine people and killed two. The doctor had been charged ten cases in the indictment: two deaths and eight cases of severe torture. The acts were celebrated in 2011 and 2012 in Syria. For the 40-year-old defendant today, accommodation was imposed in preventive detention.

The presiding judge Christoph Koller described the deeds of the accused Alaa M. in the military hospital in the city of Homs in the reasoning. There he belonged to a group of doctors who was known as the “disposal group”. Victims were imprisoned civilians who were assigned to the opposition to the then ruler Bashar al-Assad.

The doctor had lived out sadistic tendencies and these during torture. “Above all, the accused enjoyed physical pain to cause him inferior and inferior,” said Koller.

The process lasted almost three and a half years. Sacrifices had described the most severe abuse in the negotiations, among other things, strikes, kicks and the lighting of wounds and parts of the body were reported.

Koller emphasized without the willingness and the courage of witnesses, the crime could not have been informed. The Assad regime tried to influence the procedure until its fall. Despite threats, the witnesses in public trial reported the events. It was very moving.

Alaa M. has lived in Germany for ten years and had worked in several clinics as orthopedic surgeons, most recently in Bad Wildungen in northern Hesse. The family man was arrested in the summer of 2020 – victims had recognized him in a TV documentary about the Syrian city of Homs. Since then he has been in custody.

Process according to the world law principle

The fact that the man has to answer to a German court for crimes in his homeland is also due to the so -called world law principle in international criminal law. It allows possible war crimes of foreigners in other countries to be pursued in this country too.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office had requested life imprisonment for the man in her plea, with subsequent preventive detention. His lawyers demanded an acquittal for the accusation of the killings. Your client did not work in Homs in the period in question. In the process, Alaa M. himself did not think he was the victim of a complotting. The judgment is not yet final.