Alaa M. is accused of torturing prisoners and killing at least one dissident of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: this Syrian doctor, who also practiced in Germany, is on trial in a Frankfurt court for crimes against humanity from today.
He was arrested in June 2020 in Essi and is accused of 18 incidents of torturing dissidents and the murder of a prisoner.
For all these charges the federal prosecutor accuses him of "crimes against humanity", based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. Using this principle, which allows a country to extradite perpetrators of serious crimes regardless of nationality and where they were committed, Germany last week sentenced a former Syrian army colonel to life in prison.
Alaa M., who denies the charges against him, allegedly committed these crimes in two military hospitals in Homs and Damascus. His actions demonstrate, according to opponents of the Assad regime, the use of these hospitals as part of the suppression of the rebellion.
He is on trial at the district court in Frankfurt and faces a life sentence.
The doctor also worked in a Syrian Army Intelligence prison from April 2011 to the end of 2012 in Homs, a Syrian opposition stronghold.
"New method" of torture
After hitting a prisoner with a globe, the doctor then "injected him with a lethal substance (...) from which he died within a few minutes," according to the Karlsruhe prosecutor's office.
The doctor allegedly gave this injection "to prove his power and to suppress the rebellion of part of the Syrian people", the indictment states.
The doctor is also alleged to have poured alcohol on a teenager's genitals and then set him on fire in the emergency room of the Homs military hospital during the summer of 2011, the year the Syrian uprising broke out. He then declared to his colleagues that he had discovered "a new method" of torture.
The dissidents he tortured suffered blows to the head, chest, genitals, wounds. The doctor also allegedly reattached a broken bone without anaesthetic, poured alcohol-based antiseptic on the wound before setting it on fire, according to evidence gathered by the German judiciary.
The doctor left Syria in 2015 to move to Germany thanks to visas provided by Berlin to Syrians in professions in which there was a shortage of staff, such as doctors. Alaa M. He was an orthopedic surgeon and worked in several hospitals in Germany before he was recognized by Syrian refugees.
When he was arrested in June 2020, he was working at a rehabilitation clinic in Bad Wildungen, a hot spring resort in Hessen. His colleagues were unaware of his past.
Prosecutors in Karlsruhe consider Alaa M. an ardent supporter of Assad, who treated dissidents as "cockroaches" and participated "without inhibitions" in their suppression.
Source: RES-EAP