‘Iran kidnapped my German-citizen father – then put him to death,’ says daughter of Jamshid Sharmahd

Amnesty International condemns the execution of the 69-year-old software engineer after ‘forced confessions’ and a ‘sham trial’

Jamshid Sharmahd made what would be his last video call to his family in a Dubai hotel room on July 28 2020.
The 69-year-old Iranian-German software engineer with permanent US residency was just hours away from a connecting flight to India, but would never reach his destination.
He couldn’t have known that the mundane details of travel – checking flight times, arranging airport transport, packing his laptop – would be his final acts of freedom.
Iranian agents were already closing in on him, transforming a simple layover into the beginning of a fatal odyssey.
His daughter, Gazelle Sharmahd, recounts those final moments with the weight of someone who has replayed them countless times and searched for ways the story might have ended differently.
“We last saw him on July 28 in his hotel room,” she tells The Telegraph from Los Angeles, her voice breaking. “And from there, he was kidnapped.”
The man the agents stalked through Dubai’s summer heat was not a warrior or a militant.
His weapons, as his daughter explains, were far simpler: “He was fighting the Islamic Republic with words.”
The agents kidnapped him and forcefully transferred him to Iran through Oman in what they would later describe as a “complex intelligence operation”.
In 2006 or 2007, long before social media gave dissent its digital megaphone, Mr Sharmahd had created a website where Iranians could freely share their thoughts.
The software engineer would spend his final years in Tehran’s notorious prisons before being hanged right before the morning call for prayer on Monday this week.
Iran’s judiciary accused him of terrorism and sentenced him to death in 2023 following what Amnesty International described as “forced confessions” and a “sham trial”.
His family, Germany, the US, the UN and international rights groups denied the allegations against him.
Gazelle Sharmahd cannot accept her father’s execution and speaks of him defiantly in the present tense.
“They claim that my father is dead and we don’t have proof. They haven’t given us proof. They haven’t shown us where he died, or what happened to him,” she said.
“My father is heroic, people like my father are like a diamond in the sea, one of the only people who are not afraid to speak the truth.”
Emphasising her father’s innocence, she adds: “My father had done nothing wrong.”
Now she faces some of the attacks he bore for years.
“I’m thinking right now about all of these years and the slander and what he’d been through,” Sharmahd said.
“I just got a glimpse of what he went through right now because now the pressure is coming on me. I don’t know how he survived.
“He is the kind of person that you want to go to when you have a catastrophe,” Gazelle adds, her voice heavy again with sorrow.
“He is the kind of person that I would go to right now and ask, what can I do? What should I do?”
She said the US and German governments had “failed” to protect Mr Sharmahd.
“They have failed to protect my father,” she declared. “The moment he was kidnapped, they did nothing.”
The final betrayal, in her view, came during Iran’s hostage swap with the US last year.
“The last one, last September by the Biden administration, did not include my father.
“They excluded him without any explanation. They condemned him to death by doing that. They did not take responsibility.
“When he was held hostage there for 1,500 days, they did nothing. When he was put on sham trial after sham trial, they did nothing.”
Germany ordered the closure of all three Iranian consulates on Thursday in response to Mr Sharmahd’s execution, leaving the Islamic Republic with only its embassy in Berlin.
It has also urged German citizens to leave the Islamic Republic because “Iran is taking German citizens hostage” and they want to “spare other German citizens” from Mr Sharmahd’s fate.
The German foreign ministry summoned Iran’s charge d’affaires on Tuesday to protest the execution.
Markus Potzel, German ambassador to Iran, also protested to Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, before being recalled to Berlin.
Iran rejected Germany’s protests, with Araghchi saying on his X account that “a German passport does not provide impunity to anyone”.
Araghchi also accused Germany of being an “accomplice in the ongoing Israeli genocide,” referring to Berlin’s support for Israel.
Mr Sharmahd was one of several Iranian dissidents abroad who were either tricked or kidnapped back to Iran in recent years, following the collapse of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Families of other detainees with dual nationality in Iran are increasingly worried about their loved ones’ fates after Mr Sharmahd’s execution.
They include Vida Mehrannia, the wife of Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian-Swedish academic who has been on death row since 2017.
Mr Djalali, a resident in Sweden, was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to death the following year on charges of espionage for Israel’s Mossad.
“He called me a day after Mr Sharmahd was executed, and he was very worried,” Mrs Mehrannia tells The Telegraph from Stockholm. “He was heartbroken for Mr Sharmahd and his family.
“He was very sad for Mr Sharmahd’s daughter, who tried for years to do everything she could for her father.”
Mrs Mehrannia fears her husband could face the same sudden fate.
“My husband might be executed any moment, just like Mr Sharmahd. It’s a big alarm for all death row prisoners,” she said, adding that her husband’s health has worsened after multiple hunger strikes.
She urges Western governments to do everything possible to make Iran stop “these inhuman executions”.
“They cannot only condemn them and still maintain relations with Iran,” Mrs Mehrannia says.
Western governments and human rights groups have repeatedly accused the Islamic Republic of taking dual and foreign nationals hostage for the sole purpose of using them in prisoner swaps or as a bargaining chip in international negotiations.
“I’m very worried,” Mrs Mehrannia says. “It can happen to my husband any moment.”