Second Syria torture trial opens in Germany

BERLIN, Jan 19 (Reuters) – A Syrian doctor suspected of crimes against humanity, including torturing prisoners at military hospitals in Syria, goes on trial in Germany on Wednesday in the second such case over alleged state-backed torture in Syria’s conflict.

After a landmark German court ruling last week sentencing a Syrian former intelligence officer to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, the trial of the 36-year-old doctor will start at the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main.

The defendant, identified as Alaa M. under German privacy laws, is accused of torturing opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while working as a doctor at a military prison and hospitals in Homs and Damascus in 2011 and 2012.

The Assad government denies accusations of having tortured prisoners.

Alaa M. arrived in Germany in 2015 to work as a doctor, until he was arrested in June 2020. He has been in pre-trial detention since then.

German prosecutors have used universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to seek trials for suspects in crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world.

Prosecutors have charged Alaa M. with 18 cases of torture and say he killed one of the prisoners. In one of the cases, the defendant is accused of carrying out a bone fracture correction surgery without sufficient anaesthesia.

He is also accused of attempting to deprive prisoners of their reproductive capacity in two cases.

Other torture methods that prosecutors say he used against detained civilians include dousing the genitals of a teenage boy with alcohol at Homs military hospital and igniting them with a lighter.

The doctor also worked at the Mezzeh 601 military hospital in Damascus whose morgues and courtyard, according to Human Rights Watch, were seen in a cache of photographs which depicted the scale of state-sponsored torture against civilians and were smuggled abroad by a government photographer known as Caesar.

Antonia Klein, a legal adviser at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which is supporting a plaintiff in the case, said sexual violence as a crime against humanity will play an important role in the trial.

“The trial also shows…how diverse the crimes (in Syria’s conflict) are and how much is still to come,” said Klein.

Syrian lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, who heads a human rights group in Berlin that helped build the case against Alaa M., said the trial would yield more evidence that the Syrian government abetted torture to overcome an uprising against Assad.

“We hope he will get a life sentence,” al-Bunni said, adding that he expected the court to reach a verdict by the end of this year.

Editing by Joseph Nasr and Mark Heinrich

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