FRANKFURT, Germany (CN) — The trial of a Syrian doctor accused of torturing and killing patients at military hospitals during the country's civil war opened in Germany on Wednesday.
The doctor identified only as Alaa M. is charged with 18 counts of crimes against humanity for allegedly abusing his patients at three hospitals, including setting fire to the genitals of a teenage boy. For privacy reasons, German courts do not release the full names of suspects.
The 36-year-old, who has been living in Germany for the past seven years, wore a dark green parka and covered his face with the coat’s faux-fur trimmed hood during the hearing before the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt.
Via his lawyers on Wednesday, the doctor did not comment on the indictment, saying he will do so at a hearing next week. He has denied all of the charges.
Along the sidewalk outside of the courthouse, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a human rights organization that tracks abuses in the Middle Eastern country, displayed posters of Syrians whose whereabouts are unknown. German authorities opened an investigation into Alaa M. after witnesses came forward, including one of his former prisoners.
German law allows for the prosecution of certain serious crimes, like crimes against humanity and genocide, even if the events do not occur within the countries borders, under a legal concept known as universal jurisdiction.
The Syrian national moved to Germany in 2015 on a highly skilled migrant visa to work as a doctor and practiced medicine until his arrest in 2020. According to the indictment, between April 2011 and the end of 2012 he worked at three Syrian military hospitals, one in the capital city Damascus and two in the western city of Homs. One of the places he worked, referred to as hospital 601, was known as the "Human Slaughterhouse."
While working, prosecutors claim Alaa M. attempted to forcibly sterilize two people, one a 14 or 15-year-old boy, by pouring alcohol in their genitals and lighting them on fire; kicked and beat detainees, including one man who later died; and poured sanitizer on the septic wound of a detainee and set it on fire.
His arrest in 2020 brought to light systemic medical violence under the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“With the trial of Alaa M., the role of military hospitals and medical staff in this system could be addressed for the very first time,” Wolfgang Kaleck, general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said in a statement when the charges were announced nearly two years ago.
Some of the evidence in the case has come from the famed so-called Ceasar photos, a cache of 53,275 photographs taken by a military photographer given the codename Ceasar who defected from the Syrian government in 2013.
“Over the past decade, a large amount of evidence about atrocities in Syria has been collected, and now, as this case in Frankfurt shows, those efforts are starting to bear fruit,” said Balkees Jarrah, interim international justice director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.
The trial started less than a week after another German court convicted a senior Syrian official for crimes against humanity for the murder and torture of political prisoners. Anwar Raslan headed the infamous military intelligence facility known as Branch 251. Raslan was the second official to be convicted by a German court for crimes in Syria. Eyad Al-Gharib, a former member of Syria’s secret police, was convicted in February 2021 of facilitating the torture of prisoners at the same facility.
The Syrian civil war, which first broke out in 2011, has left more than half a million people dead and some 12 million displaced, according to the United Nations.
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