TEHRAN, Iran
Iranian state media reported on Monday that Jamshid Sharmahd had been executed after he was convicted last year.
Courtesy |
Sharmahd (pictured above) was sentenced to
death in February 2023 following a conviction by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Court on charges linked to his involvement in a deadly 2008 attack on a mosque
in Shiraz that killed 14 people.
However, the formal conviction
in Iran was for the much more vague Iranian criminal offense of “corruption on
Earth,” a catch-all phrase the Islamic regime uses for an array of purported
crimes, often related to religious values.
Iranian media including the
legal news site Mizan reported that the execution took place on Monday morning.
Iran had also accused him of
being in contact with “FBI and CIA officers” and of having “attempted to
contact Israeli Mossad agents.”
Tehran had accused Sharmahd of
being the “ringleader of the terrorist Tondar group, who directed armed and
terrorist acts in Iran from America.” The little-known Tondar group, the armed
wing of the “Kingdom Assembly of Iran,” is based in California and says it
seeks to restore Iran’s monarchy that was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic
revolution.
Before his kidnapping,
believed to have taken place in Dubai, and subsequent detention in Iran, the
69-year old Sharmahd had been residing in California.
His daughter, Gazelle, had
spearheaded the fight calling for him to be spared execution.
Germany, the EU and others had
also called for the death sentence to be lifted.
“I don’t think words can
change a terrorist regime,” Gazelle Sharmahd told DW soon after her father’s
conviction in 2023. “This is a regime that kidnaps people like my Dad from
outside of Iran, takes them over there. … This terrorist regime will not respond
to any kind of talks or diplomacy. We have seen this, unfortunately.”
German Foreign Minister
Annalena Baerbock last year called Sharmahd’s setence “absolutely
unacceptable,” and also said he had not been given a fair trial.
Rights NGO Amnesty
International made similar complaints in reports on the case, calling the legal
proceedings “grossly unfair.” In a report on the original conviction last
April, Amnesty said Sharmahd was denied access to an independent lawyer of his
own choosing and alleged that the state-appointed defense attorney’s services
were inadequate.
“His government-appointed lawyer told his family on July 2, 2022, that there was ‘no point’ to him objecting against the Revolutionary Court admitting his forced ‘confessions’ as evidence,” Amnesty wrote. “Prior to this, on May 9, 2021, the government-appointed lawyer said that without payment of US$250,000 from the family, he would not defend Jamshid Sharmahd in court and would only ‘sit there’.”
No comments:
Post a Comment