German-Iranian national and longtime US resident executed in Iran
By Benjamin Brown and Hamdi Alkhshali, CNN
(CNN) — A German-Iranian national and longtime US resident has been executed in Iran after being convicted of terrorism offences, according to Iranian state media citing the country’s judiciary-affiliated Mizan news agency.
Jamshid Sharmahd, 69, was executed Monday morning for “planning and orchestrating a series of terrorist acts,” state-run IRNA and Press TV reported. His execution sparked condemnation from the United States and Germany.
Sharmahd’s daughter Gazelle has repeatedly said her father is innocent and that he faced a sham trial due to his political activism and criticism of the Islamic Republic.
In a post on Instagram Monday, she accused the German and US government of failing her father, and described his reported death as “apparently retaliation (for) Israeli strikes on the regime.” Israel struck Iran multiple times on Saturday in an escalating regional tit-for-tat.
Sharmahd was arrested in 2020 by Iranian authorities who claimed he headed a group accused of a deadly 2008 bombing in the city of Shiraz, according to state-run news agencies ISNA and IRNA.
He was sentenced to death in 2022 for “corruption on Earth,” sparking widespread condemnation from human rights groups and Western governments.
“He has been sentenced to death after a legal proceeding that has been widely criticized as a sham trial,” Vedant Patel, the US State Department’s principal deputy spokesperson said in a briefing last fall. Amnesty International also described the trial as “grossly unfair.”
Following the news of his execution, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that Sharmahd’s “murder” showed Tehran to be an “inhumane regime” that “uses death as a weapon.”
Baerbock said the execution would have “serious consequences.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pushed back against Baerbock’s criticism, saying, “A German passport does not provide impunity to anyone, let alone a terrorist criminal.”
Germany and Iran summoned each other’s diplomats on Tuesday to protest their respective concerns.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller also condemned the execution of Sharmahd, a longtime California resident, saying his killing “reminds us once again of the brutal brutality and repression that characterizes the Iranian regime.”
The United States’ Office of the Special Envoy for Iran said it was looking into reports of Sharmahd’s execution and said his killing would “represent the latest abhorrent act in the regime’s long history of transnational repression and accelerating rate of executions.”
Sharmahd’s “kidnapping and rendition, as well as sham trial and reports of torture, were reprehensible,” the envoy’s office added.
Abram Paley, the US Deputy Special Envoy, last year met with Sharmahd’s family to discuss his imprisonment and death sentence.
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CNN’s Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.
