Germany on Wednesday said it was expelling two diplomats from the Iranian embassy in Berlin over the death sentence an Iranian court handed down against an Iranian-German national.
After the death penalty verdict Tuesday against Jamshid Sharmahd, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement Berlin was "declaring two Iranian embassy staff members to be persona non grata" and "ordering them to leave Germany".
A ministry spokesman said later the Iranians would have "a few days" to quit the country.
Baerbock summoned Iran's charge d'affaires over the case of Sharmahd, who supporters say was abducted abroad and forcibly returned to Iran for a show trial.
"We call on Iran to reverse the death penalty for Jamshid Sharmahd and to make it possible for him to have a fair appeal based on the rule of law," she said.
The Tehran Revolutionary Court convicted Sharmahd, 67, in connection with the deadly bombing of a mosque in 2008, the judiciary's Mizan Online website reported.
Iranian authorities announced in August 2020 that Sharmahd, who is also a US resident, was arrested in what they described as a "complex operation" without specifying how, where or when he was seized.
His family says he was kidnapped by the Iranian security services while in transit in Dubai and then brought under duress to the Islamic republic.
Needs heroic measures
His daughter Gazelle Sharmahd on Wednesday insisted on his innocence and called on EU countries to ratchet up the pressure to save him.
European governments "should use all the means in their political arsenal -- each and every one of them," she told AFP.
"It needs heroic measures right now. It needs extreme measures."
Baerbock had condemned the ruling on Tuesday as "absolutely unacceptable" and promised a "strong reaction" to the decision, resulting in Wednesday's expulsion order.
"Not only is the death penalty cruel, inhuman and degrading, but Jamshid Sharmahd has never had anything approaching a fair trial," Baerbock said.
The German foreign minister has been at the forefront of Western voices condemning Tehran's bloody crackdown on demonstrations and executions of anti-government protesters.
Sharmahd is accused by Iran of leading the Tondar group which aims to topple the Islamic republic and is outlawed as a terrorist organisation by Iran.
Mizan said Sharmahd planned to commit 23 "terrorist" acts, of which he succeeded in five, including the bombing of a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz on April 12, 2008, which killed 14 people and wounded 300 others.
Prosecutors had also accused Sharmahd of having established contact with "FBI and CIA officers" and of having "attempted to contact Israeli Mossad agents".
In 2009, Iran convicted and hanged three men for the Shiraz bombing, claiming they had links to the monarchist group and had taken their orders from "an Iranian CIA agent" based in the United States in an attempt to assassinate a senior official in Iran.
Fading away
Sharmahd's family have ridiculed the charges against him and raised serious concerns about his condition.
Gazelle Sharmahd said he had lost all his teeth in jail and no longer had the right to speak to his loved ones.
"Dad has been fading away in prison," she told AFP.
"We don't even know where he is, we don't know how he is doing or even if he knows this horrible news (of the verdict) and if every time his cell door opens he thinks he is going to be pulled out for the last time."
The head of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group, Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam, urged a resolute EU response to the death sentence, which he said Tehran was using as a political tool.
"Kidnapping and threatening to kill Jamshid Sharmahd based on an unlawful sentence is the Islamic Republic's attempt to blackmail the European Union with the aim of easing the political pressure," he said in a statement.
"Germany and the European community must react decisively to this terrorist act."
