Rally for Sharmahd in Berlin Image: AFP
The Iranian government has rejected a request from CDU leader Friedrich Merz to visit the German-Iranian opposition leader Jamshid Sharmahd, who has been sentenced to death.
The Iranian government has rejected a request from CDU leader Friedrich Merz to visit the German-Iranian opposition leader Jamshid Sharmahd, who has been sentenced to death. As Merz told the AFP news agency on Friday, his application for entry was rejected after several months of processing.
“The regime refuses to give me insight into the conditions in which Jamshid Sharmahd, a German citizen, is being held,” Merz said. “This shows once again that the trial against Jamshid Sharmahd has nothing to do with the rule of law.” Merz announced that he would “continue to exhaust all possibilities to point out his fate and demand his release”.
The reply from the Iranian ambassador in Berlin, Mahmoud Farazandeh, to Merz’s request states that he is “always welcome in my country as a high-ranking German politician to hold talks there with your Iranian counterparts on bilateral and international issues”. According to the laws of the Republic of Iran, however, it is “not possible for foreign politicians to visit Iranian prisoners in Iran”.
According to his family, the opposition leader Jamshid Sharmahd, who had last lived in the USA for years, was arrested and abducted by the Iranian secret service in Dubai in the summer of 2020. Since then he has been in prison in Iran. On February 21, he was sentenced to death on terrorism charges, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence at the end of April.
HOME PAGE