Sweden – Blankspot, October 30, 2024
The news that the Iranian regime had executed 69-year-old Jamshid Sharmahd – a German-Iranian software engineer and opposition activist – hit like lightning.
There was no warning to his family, no last phone call or letter, no chance to say goodbye. This senseless cruelty to his loved ones was undoubtedly deliberate. It sends a clear signal to the West that the Iranian regime feels able to act with complete impunity and that it does not hesitate to assert its power.
This should send chills down the spines of all democratic societies – all 30 or so that remain in the world.
Jamshid Sharmahd was kidnapped in 2020 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from a hotel at Dubai airport. He was tried on fabricated terrorism charges (for his links to the opposition group Tondar, which Iran considers a terrorist organization) and sentenced to death. According to Iran, the group was behind a deadly bombing of a mosque in the city of Shiraz in 2008. Three men have previously been executed for the attack and two others have been sentenced to death. Sharmahd has denied any involvement in these attacks.
Over the past several decades, Jamshid Sharmahd has shared the same fate as thousands of political prisoners in Iran, who are forced to endure physical and psychological torture on a daily basis in Iran’s prison system, including severe isolation, threats to family members, brutal beatings, eye gouging, starvation and rape.
Despite this, Sharmahd’s execution feels like a punch in the gut at this moment.
Sharmahd lived for years in Hannover, Germany, my hometown. You suddenly realize that this is “one of us” – a thought you may want to dismiss, but in the end simply cannot.
For Sweden, the fate of Sharmahd should also be burned. The similarities with the case of Ahmadreza Djalali – a Swedish-Iranian doctor and lecturer in disaster medicine who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2017 – are too frightening to ignore. Like Sharmahd, Djalali has dual citizenship and has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges and sentenced to death.
Last year, Sharmahd was left out of a controversial prisoner swap between the United States and Iran, an exchange that involved the regime gaining access to $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Iranian officials later demanded a separate payment of $2 billion for Sharmahd’s release – something the US refused.
Serious flaws also characterized the deal Sweden struck last summer, when the government decided to play its only trump card and release Iranian mass murderer Hamid Nouri in exchange for two Swedish citizens (Swedish diplomat Johan Floderus and businessman Saeed Azizi). Djalali was left out, despite the fact that he was already Sweden’s longest-held prisoner in Iran and at risk of execution.
The missed opportunities to free Sharmahd, Djalali, and several other American and European prisoners tragically underscore the international community’s inability to find a workable strategy to effectively counter transnational repression and international hostage-taking.
Sharmahd’s family, especially his daughter Gazelle, fought tirelessly for his release and to get the US and German governments to act on his behalf. For years, Germany failed to address Sharmahd’s situation publicly and ignored his family’s pleas to take a clear stand.
Now, only after his horrific death, the German government is taking a stronger stance. German Foreign Minister Annalena Bärbock publicly condemned Sharmahd’s murder. She also ordered Germany’s ambassador to Tehran to return home for immediate consultations and summoned Iran’s chargé d’affaires in Berlin.
The German Foreign Ministry announced that it is considering further measures, including tightening economic sanctions. Bilateral trade between Germany and Iran actually increased in 2023/24. Other measures under consideration include the expulsion of Iranian officials and the possible closure of Iran’s consulate general.
For the families of the hostages, however, all this seems meaningless: simply too little, too late.
On the X platform, Sharmahd’s daughter Gazelle (@HostageAid) is quoted in a statement she demands an explanation as to why the father was not part of the billion-dollar deal for the latest prisoner and hostage exchange and why a German-American journalist with a death sentence was not prioritized?
She also wants proof of his death and clarity on the circumstances of his execution, and says Germany and the US must now immediately bring Jamshid’s body home for a dignified burial and ensure that the regime does not use his body as a bargaining chip.
