Germany to close Iranian consulates over execution

The execution announced on Monday had already provoked tit-for tat diplomatic expulsions

BERLIN: Germany will close the three Iranian consulates on its soil in response to the execution of German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Thursday.

“We have repeatedly and unequivocally made it clear to Tehran that the execution of a German citizen will have serious consequences,” Baerbock said, announcing the closure of the consulates in Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg in a televised speech.

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The execution announced on Monday had already provoked tit-for tat diplomatic expulsions, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz calling it a “scandal”.

“The fact that this assassination took place in the light of the latest developments in the Middle East shows that (Iran’s) dictatorial, unjust regime... does not act according to normal diplomatic logic,” Baerbock said.

“It is not without reason that our diplomatic relations are already at an all-time low,” she said.

Sharmahd, 69, had been sentenced to death in February 2023 for the capital offence of “corruption on Earth”, a sentence later confirmed by the Iranian Supreme Court.

He had been convicted of playing a role in a 2008 mosque bombing in the southern city of Shiraz, in which 14 people were killed and 300 wounded.

His family have long maintained that Sharmahd was innocent.

But Iran has defended his execution and declared that “a German passport does not provide impunity to anyone, let alone a terrorist criminal”.

The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell earlier this week said the bloc condemned Sharmahd’s “killing in the strongest possible terms” and was also “considering measures in response”.

Sharmahd, a German citizen of Iranian descent and a US resident, was a software engineer who had worked and written for an Iranian opposition group’s website based abroad that strongly criticised the Islamic republic’s leadership.

He was seized by Iranian authorities in 2020 while travelling through the United Arab Emirates, according to his family.