A court in Iran
has sentenced German-Iranian dissident Jamshid Sharmahd to death on the charge
of "corruption on Earth", the judiciary has said.
Sharmahd, 67,
who lived in the US, is believed to have been kidnapped by Iranian agents in
Dubai in 2020 and then forcibly taken to Iran via Oman.
Best Clothing
Iran accused him of being the leader of a pro-monarchist terrorist group.
He denied the
claim and a human rights group said he faced a grossly unfair trial based on
forced "confessions".
Germany's
Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, condemned the sentence as "absolutely
unacceptable".
"We call on
Iran to remedy these shortcomings in the appeals process, correct the verdict
accordingly and refrain from the death penalty," a statment said.
"Imposing
the death penalty on Mr Sharmahd will provoke a strong reaction."
It comes just
over a month after Iran executed British-Iranian dual national Alireza Akbari,
a former deputy Iranian defence minister who was convicted of spying for the
UK.
The Iranian
judiciary's Mizan news agency reported that a Revolutionary Court in Tehran had
found Jamshid Sharmahd guilty of "spreading corruption on Earth through
planning and leading terror operations".
It alleged that
he was the leader of a terrorist group known as Tondar and that he had
"planned 23 terror attacks", of which "five were
successful", including the 2008 bombing of a mosque in Shiraz in that
killed 14 people.
Best Clothing
Tondar - which
means "thunder" in Persian - is another name of the Kingdom Assembly
of Iran (KAI), a little-known US-based opposition group that seeks to restore
the monarchy overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
According to
Amnesty International, Sharmahd created a website to publish statements from
the KAI, including claims of explosions inside Iran. He also read out
statements in radio and video broadcasts.
However, he
denied his involvement in the attacks attributed to him by Iranian authorities,
saying he was only a spokesman, and rejected all accusations during his trial,
which began earlier this month.
Amnesty
International said Sharmahd alleged in two telephone calls with his family last
year that he had been tortured and subjected to other ill-treatment in
detention, including by being held in prolonged solitary confinement.
He also said he
had been denied adequate healthcare, with access to medications required for
his Parkinson's disease delayed routinely.
In August 2020,
Iran's intelligence ministry announced that it had arrested Sharmahd following
a "complex operation", without providing any details.
The previous
month, Sharmahd had arrived in the United Arab Emirates on a flight from Germany.
He was staying at a hotel in Dubai, awaiting a connecting flight to India, when
his family lost contact.
They were able
to track his mobile phone's location, however, and noticed that it had crossed
the border with Oman, despite it being closed for travel because of
coronavirus-related restrictions, an unnamed source told the UN Human
Rights Council's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
The source said
the family had received a message from Sharmahd's phone saying that he was well
a day before Iran had published a video in which he appeared blindfolded and
confessed to various crimes.
The UN working
group said the UAE did not contest the claim that Sharmahd was kidnapped and
transferred to Oman by Iranian agents. Oman meanwhile concluded that he
infiltrated the country with the help of a group of facilitators and illegally
left for Iran by sea "of his own free will".
In 2019,
dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was reportedly abducted by Revolutionary
Guards during a visit to Iraq and forcibly returned to Iran. He was
executed the next year after being convicted of "corruption on Earth".
By David Gritten || BBC News
0 comments:
Post a Comment