Iran on Monday executed 69-year-old German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd after years in captivity, media in the Islamic Republic said, sparking outrage in Germany and beyond.
Berlin called the execution a “scandal” and warned of “serious consequences” for Iran’s “inhumane regime,” however Sharmahd’s daughter accused both Germany and the U.S. of “abandoning” her father.
Sharmahd, a German citizen of Iranian descent and a U.S. resident, was kidnapped by Iranian authorities in 2020 while travelling through the United Arab Emirates, according to his family. Iran, which does not recognise dual citizenship, announced his arrest after a “complex operation,” without specifying how, where or when he was seized.
Sharmahd was sentenced to death in February 2023 for the capital offence of “corruption on Earth,” a sentence later confirmed by the Iranian Supreme Court. The Iranian judiciary’s Mizan website said on Monday that “the death sentence of Jamshid Sharmahd… was carried out this morning.”
He had been convicted of playing a role in a 2008 mosque bombing in the southern city of Shiraz, in which 14 people were killed and 300 wounded. However, his family have long maintained that Sharmahd was innocent.
Sharmahd was also accused of leading the Tondar group, which aims to topple the Islamic Republic. Iran classes it as a terrorist organisation.
Sharmahd’s daughter Gazelle said in a post on X that she was waiting for the German and U.S. governments to provide “concrete proof” that her father had been killed. If so, his body should be brought home “immediately” and the Iranian government should face “severe punishment,” she said.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the killing “shows once again what kind of inhumane regime rules in Tehran: a regime that uses death against its youth, its own population and foreign nationals.”
She added that Berlin had repeatedly made clear “that the execution of a German national would have serious consequences.”
“This underlines the fact that no one is safe under the new government either,” she said in reference to the administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was inaugurated in July.
Baerbock expressed her “heartfelt sympathy” for Sharmahd’s family, “with whom we have always been in close contact”, and said the German embassy in Tehran had worked “tirelessly” on his behalf.
However, Gazelle Sharmahd accused both the German and U.S. governments of “abandoning” her father in negotiations and said that the family had been ignored.
In a post on X, she wrote:
The director of Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, called the execution “a case of extrajudicial killing of a hostage aimed at covering up the recent failures of the hostage-takers of the Islamic Republic.”
“Jamshid Sharmahd was kidnapped in the United Arab Emirates and unlawfully transferred to Iran, where he was sentenced to death without a fair trial,” said Amiry-Moghaddam, whose group closely tracks executions in Iran.
Sharmahd grew up in an Iranian-German family and moved to California in 2003, where he was accused of making statements hostile to both Iran and Islam on television.
Mizan said Sharmahd was “a criminal terrorist” who “was hosted by the United States as well as European countries and was operating under the complex protection of their intelligence services.”
Several other Europeans are still being held in Iran, including at least three French citizens.
