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Washington: Protest against executions in Iran
Photo: Allison Bailey / NurPhoto / IMAGO
The Iranian regime has again carried out a death sentence and executed a Kurdish activist.
The execution took place on Wednesday morning by hanging, as the Iranian news agency Fars reported in the evening.
Iran's judiciary has accused activist Arash Ahmadi of killing a police officer.
According to information from the Oslo-based human rights organization Hengaw, the man had been in prison for two years.
The 29-year-old was therefore a member of the Kurdish Komala Party in Iran.
The execution took place in the city of Kermanshah.
Human rights activists have criticized the use of the death penalty in Iran for years.
Critics say it is also carried out as a means of repression and after unfair trials.
Official figures for the executions are not known.
According to Amnesty International, at least 250 people were executed in Iran in the first half of 2022, mainly for drug-related offences.
Recently, several death sentences were pronounced against supporters of the protest movement.
Tehran reported in early January that it had executed two protesters.
They allegedly killed a member of the security forces.
A few days later, the execution of the British-Iranian dual national Aliresa Akbari became known.
The former top politician was executed on espionage charges.
Concern for German-Iranian citizen Jamshid Sharmahd
Internationally, it is now feared that the Iranian-German national Jamshid Sharmahd is threatened with a similar fate.
He was sentenced to death this week for "corruption on earth."
The 67-year-old German-Iranian dual national was kidnapped in a secret service operation from Dubai in 2020 and has been imprisoned in Iran since then.
In response to the death sentence, the Federal Foreign Office summoned Tehran's envoy and declared two members of the Iranian embassy to be "undesirable persons".
When asked by SPIEGEL, the Federal Foreign Office did not provide any information on how many Germans are currently in detention in Iran.
In addition to Sharmahd, the case of the Cologne architect Nahid Taghavi, who has been in prison since October 2020 and was sentenced to more than ten years in prison for alleged participation in an illegal group and "propaganda against the state", is also known.
Most recently, the Federal Foreign Office asked German citizens who are still in the country to leave the country and issued a travel warning for Iran.
"For German nationals there is a concrete risk of being arrested arbitrarily, interrogated and sentenced to long prison terms," the website said, with dual nationals in particular being at risk.
asc/dpa