Judiciary appoints Ruhollah Zam as lawyer for Iranian-German prisoner Jamshid Sharmehed

Ghazala Sharmehed: No one we trust has met my father yet

On Saturday, August 11, 2020, security officials in the Islamic Republic announced that Jamshid Sharmehed, a German-Iranian citizen and director of Radio Thunder, which is the media outlet of the Iranian Royal Society in America, had been arrested and taken to Iran.

Media outlets close to the Iranian government have released images of Jamshid Sharmehed, showing him in the hands of the Islamic Republic's security forces. The report also aired excerpts of Jamshid Sharmehed's statements, in which he introduces himself and explains his activities.

Four months after Jamshid Sharmehed's arrest, the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran have still not specifically announced how Jamshid Sharmehed was kidnapped, and no details of his case have been published.

Ghazala Sharmehed, Jamshid Sharmehed's daughter, told the Iran Human Rights Campaign, noting that in all these four months we managed to talk to our father only four times, "We don't know exactly where my father is being held and what his conditions are. In phone calls, he only explains about his physical condition and keeps trying to tell us that everything is fine and there are no problems, and in fact he doesn't tell us any further explanation about the status of the case."

Ghazala Sharmehed says that so far, no one we trust has been able to see my father. Not the lawyer we arranged for him, nor anyone from the German consulate in Iran. According to Ghazala Sharmehed, “We still cannot say with certainty whether my father is in Tehran or somewhere else in Iran.”

According to Ms. Sharmehed, the judicial authorities in Iran announced that Mr. Daryabigi would be my father’s appointed lawyer. “After it was announced that Daryabigi had been appointed as my father’s lawyer, the only thing I could do was ask my father not to cooperate with the lawyers appointed by the judicial authorities,” Ghazale Sharmehed told the Iran Human Rights Campaign.

Secretary Daryabigi was previously introduced by the judiciary as the lawyer for Ruhollah Zam, a journalist opposed to the Islamic Republic's government living in France who was kidnapped by Iranian security forces during an operation in Iraq and executed on December 12 after serving more than a year in prison.

Referring to the difficulties of finding an independent lawyer to pursue her father's case in Iran and the unfamiliarity of Mr. Sharmehed's family with the judicial laws of the Islamic Republic, Ms. Sharmehed told the Iran Human Rights Campaign, "Some time ago, we managed to reach an agreement with an independent lawyer to pursue my father's case, and when he went to the Evin Prison Prosecutor's Office, they told him that such a person is not imprisoned in Evin Prison and that such a case does not exist here."

According to Ghazala Sharmehed, in a phone call she had with Mr. Sharmehed in early November, she explained to her father that the lawyer had been told that he was not in Evin Prison, and Mr. Sharmehed also said: "I was not in Evin at that time, but now tell the lawyer to go to Evin Prison and ask again."

According to Ghazala Sharmehed, it was after this conversation that our lawyer visited Evin Prison again and the prison authorities told her that Jamshid Sharmehed was being held in Evin, but that the lawyer was not allowed to enter the case until the end of the interrogation process.

From forced confessions to ignorance of the details of the case 

Jamshid Sharmehed's daughter told the Iran Human Rights Campaign, "The four times we spoke to my father, he only talked about positive things, and we don't know any details about his crime or his case."

According to Ghazala Sharmehed, the only information we know about my father’s case is from his forced confessions that were broadcast on Iranian television and the Islamic Republic’s news media. In part of the video, Mr. Sharmehed is blindfolded and refers to “Hosseinieh Shiraz.” In these televised confessions, which are broadcast in fragments, Jamshid Sharmehed says, “Before they went to Hosseinieh, they called me… they were in a good position and needed explosives, and we provided them with explosives.”

These confessions, compiled alongside images of the 1999 explosion at the Husseiniyeh of the Martyrs, affiliated with the Rahpoyan Vesal Association in Shiraz, sought to suggest that there was a direct link between Jamshid Sharmehed and the Shiraz explosion. After the explosion at the Husseiniyeh of Shiraz, conflicting reports emerged about the causes of the incident. A few months after the explosion at the Husseiniyeh of Shiraz, the then Minister of Interior, Pourmohammadi, announced that the perpetrators of the bombing in Shiraz had been arrested.

This video report also claims that Jamshid Sharmehed intended to direct and carry out several explosions in all corners of Iran, which were neutralized by security forces.

Referring to her father's anxious state and frightened voice during his televised confession, Ghazala Sharmehed says that the way he spoke and the way he looked at her while speaking indicated behind-the-scenes pressure to force him to make these confessions.

Referring to the broadcast of a portion of her father's confession on television in which he said he had prepared explosives for the explosion in Shiraz, Ghazala Sharmehed said: "I told my father, if they want to help you, why did you falsely confess on television to trying to and helping to plant a bomb?" According to Ghazala Sharmehed, her father responded to this question by saying, "Those confessions were from before, and now they want to help me."

Ms. Sharmehed says that in phone conversations, my father keeps saying, "The people who arrested me want to help me."

The story of Jamshid Sharmehd's kidnapping and the silence of the UAE and Omani authorities 

Ghazala Sharmehed told the Human Rights Campaign, "My father has been kidnapped by Iranian forces, and apart from being concerned about his condition in detention, we also want an explanation from the Islamic Republic authorities about this incident."

Ms. Sharmehed, pointing out that kidnapping my father in another country is against all laws, says, "My father was on a business trip, and when he informed my mother that he was in the Emirates, my mother became worried, and from there we monitored my father's movements using GPS, but suddenly there was no news of him for two days, and the GPS also showed that my father had gone to Oman by land."

Ghazala Sharmehed said that after Oman, it was no longer possible to track my father, saying, "It was after Iran announced that it had arrested my father in an operation in a foreign country." Ms. Sharmehed says that before we spoke to the international media and explained the story of my father's disappearance in Oman, the state media in Iran were saying in contradictory accounts that Jamshid Sharmehed had been arrested in Tajikistan, Iraq, or Turkey. But after we told the exact account, the Iranian authorities did not give any new account about how my father was kidnapped or in which country he was kidnapped, and only said that Jamshid Sharmehed had been arrested during a complex intelligence operation.

According to Mr. Sharmehed's son, his father was forced to stay at Dubai airport for several days on his way to India due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Ghazala Sharmehed told the Human Rights Campaign, "We were unable to contact the UAE and Oman embassies and get an explanation from them. The Iranian embassy in Germany responded to us by saying that the emails we sent to follow up on this incident also included the UAE and Omani officials. This response is of no use to us."

Ms. Sharmehed says that we are in regular contact with German authorities, and they say that Mr. Sharmehed is also a German citizen and that we are doing our best to follow up on my father's situation, but they do not provide any details or how they intend to help my father.

Referring to the execution of Ruhollah Zam and the fact that he, like his father, was kidnapped and taken to Iran, Ghazala Sharmeh said: "This is inhumane behavior and a violation of human rights standards, and we call on all international institutions to stop this inhumane treatment of dual-nationality prisoners."

Jamshid Sharmehed is 65 years old and immigrated to Germany in 1983. Mr. Sharmehed, who also holds German citizenship, is the founder of an engineering company in the country that worked in the design and implementation of software projects for the electronics and automotive industries.

Sharmehed went to the United States in 2003 and a year later, in 2004, he founded the "Thunder" website and then in 2007, Radio Thunder, as a media outlet for the "Iranian Monarchy Society".

The security forces' efforts to build a case against Jamshid Sharmehed have fueled concerns that this dual Iranian-German citizen may face severe punishment.

In 2007, Furud Foladvand, the founder of the "Thunder" group and the Iranian Monarchy Association, went missing on the Iran-Turkey border. Later, Amnesty International confirmed Foladvand's disappearance in a report and announced that in addition to Furud Foladvand, two other men with dual Iranian-American and Iranian-German citizenship had also disappeared. There is still no information about Furud Foladvand's condition.

Concerns have been growing about the new method used by Iranian security forces to kidnap their opponents outside the country. In recent months, in addition to Jamshid Sharmehed, Habib Asyoud, an Iranian government opponent and former head of the Arab Liberation Movement of Ahwaz, was kidnapped by Iranian security forces in Turkey.

Previously, Ruhollah Zam was lured to Iraq in a similar operation known as Operation "Deception," then kidnapped by security agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran and ultimately executed.

Source: Iran Human Rights Campaign