FRANKFURT - A Syrian doctor accused of torture and murder while working in military hospitals in his war-torn homeland told a German court on Tuesday that he"felt sorry" for patients who were beaten and blindfolded.
Mousa stands accused of 18 counts of torturing detainees in Damascus and the western city of Homs in 2011-12. Earlier this month, another German court sentenced a former Syrian colonel to life in jail for overseeing the murder of 27 people and the torture of 4,000 others at a Damascus detention centre a decade ago.Describing his experiences at the military hospital in Homs in 2011 after Arab Spring protests against President Bashar al-Assad's regime led to a brutal crackdown, Mousa said so many opposition demonstrators were brought in with injuries that it was"chaos".
Asked whether he felt sympathy for the demonstrators, Mousa said neither he nor his family were political activists.The anti-Assad protests started off peacefully, he recalled, but he said they quickly turned more"radical".The proceedings in Germany are enabled by the legal principle of"universal jurisdiction", which allows serious crimes to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a different country.