February 21,
2023
A senior member
of a U.S.-based Iranian opposition group held by Iran and accused of
orchestrating a deadly 2008 mosque bombing has been sentenced to death,
authorities said Tuesday.
Iran says
Jamshid Sharmahd, a 67-year-old Iranian-German national and U.S. resident, is
the leader of the armed wing of a group advocating the restoration of the
monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
His family has
said he was merely the spokesman for the opposition group and denied he was
involved in any attacks. They accuse Iranian intelligence of abducting him from
Dubai in 2020. His hometown is Glendora, California.
German Foreign
Minister Annalena Baerbock said the death sentence is “absolutely
unacceptable" and that there would be a “clear reaction,” without
elaborating.
She said
Sharmahd did not have “even the beginning of a fair trial” and that consular
access and access to the trial had been “repeatedly denied.” She also said he
had been arrested “under highly questionable circumstances,” without
elaborating.
The death
sentence — which can be appealed — comes against the backdrop of months of
anti-government protests in Iran and a fierce crackdown on dissent. Monarchists
based outside Iran support the protests, as do other groups and individuals
with different ideologies.
The official
website of Iran's judiciary said Sharmahd was convicted of plotting terrorist
activities. He was tried in a Revolutionary Court, where proceedings are held
behind closed doors and where rights groups say defendants are unable to choose
their lawyers or see the evidence against them.
Iranian
authorities have accused him of planning a series of attacks, including the
2008 bombing of the Hosseynieh Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in Shiraz, in which 14
people were killed and more than 200 were wounded. He has also been accused of
working with U.S. intelligence and spying on Iran's ballistic missile program.
State TV has
said his group was also behind a 2010 bombing at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s
mausoleum in Tehran that wounded several people.
Iran says
Sharmahd is the leader of Tondar, the militant wing of the opposition group
known as the Kingdom Assembly of Iran. He had been previously targeted in an
apparent Iranian assassination plot on U.S. soil in 2009.
His family says
he was passing through Dubai on his way to India for a business deal in July
2020 when he abruptly stopped responding to calls or messages from them.
Location data showed his phone leaving a hotel near the airport and traveling
south, across the border into neighboring Oman and to the port of Sohar, where
the signal stopped.
Two days later,
Iran announced that Sharmahd had been captured in a “complex operation” and the
Intelligence Ministry published a photo of him blindfolded.
His family says
he was held in solitary confinement for more than 18 months before being put on
trial in February of last year.
A Middle East
expert with Amnesty International’s German branch, Katja Müller-Fahlbusch, said
the organization is “appalled by the death sentence.”
She said in a
statement that the proceedings were “a show trial” and that “Iran withheld
numerous rights from him, including the free choice of a lawyer.”
Müller-Fahlbusch
added that Sharmahd’s family has had “as good as no contact” with him for over
two years, no one knows what prison he is in and “we have to assume that he has
been a victim of torture.” In addition, his health has “worsened dramatically”
in custody and Iranian authorities have “systematically denied him access to
appropriate medical care,” she said.
Western
officials believe Iran runs intelligence operations in Dubai and keeps tabs on
the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the cosmopolitan city in the
United Arab Emirates, which is a U.S. ally. Iran is suspected of kidnapping and
later killing British-Iranian national Abbas Yazdi in Dubai in 2013, though
Tehran has denied involvement.
The U.S. State Department
runs its Iran Regional Presence Office in Dubai, where diplomats monitor
Iranian media reports and talk to Iranians.
Iran has been
rocked by more than five months of anti-government protests ignited by the
death of a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the morality police for
allegedly violating Iran's strict Islamic dress code. The protesters have
called for the overthrow of the country's ruling clerics.
Security forces
have attacked the demonstrators with live ammunition, bird shot and batons,
rights groups say. At least 530 protesters have been killed and nearly 20,000
people have been arrested, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group
monitoring the unrest.
Iranian
authorities have blamed the protests on hostile foreign powers, without
providing evidence, and have not released official figures for those killed or
arrested.
Iran has
executed four men accused of violence linked to the protests, and activists say
at least 16 others have been sentenced to death.
Iranian foundation offers land to Salman Rushdie's attacker - state media
February
21, 2023
An
Iranian foundation has praised the man who attacked novelist Salman Rushdie
last year, leaving him severely injured, and said it will reward him with 1,000
square meters of agricultural land, state TV reported on Tuesday through its
Telegram channel.
Rushdie,
75, lost an eye and the use of one hand following the assault by a 24-year-old
Shi'ite Muslim American from New Jersey on the stage of a literary event held
near Lake Erie in western New York in August.
"We
sincerely thank the brave action of the young American who made Muslims happy
by blinding one of Rushdie's eyes and disabling one of his hands," said
Mohammad Esmail Zarei, secretary of the Foundation to Implement Imam Khomeini's
Fatwas.
"Rushdie
is now no more than living dead and to honor this brave action, about 1,000
square meters of agricultural land will be donated to the person or any of his
legal representatives," Zarei added.
Former
Iranian ayatollah issued fatwa on Rushdie
The
attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme
leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate
Rushdie a few months after The Satanic Verses was published. Some Muslims saw
passages in the novel about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.
Rushdie,
who was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, has lived with a bounty on
his head and spent nine years in hiding under British police protection.
While
Iran's pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself
from the fatwa in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty hanging over
Rushdie's head kept growing and the fatwa was never lifted.
Khomeini's
successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in
2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was "irrevocable."
The
man accused of attacking the novelist has pleaded not guilty to second-degree
attempted murder and assault charges.
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