The daughter of a California man abducted by Iran and executed on Monday condemned outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden and his vice president, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, for abandoning her father while freeing billions of dollars in funding for the terror regime.
The Iranian judiciary confirmed on Monday that it had killed Jamshid Sharmahd, a dual German-Iranian citizen, after sentencing him to death in February 2023 on dubious charges of “terrorism.” Sharmahd was abducted during a business trip while on a layover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The California resident left behind a long record of advocacy for human rights and civil liberties in Iran, including involvement in dissident media and activism.
Sharmahd hosted radio and video broadcasts for Tondar, a human rights website, Amnesty International explained in its profile the political prisoner.
“The website included statements from the Kingdom Assembly of Iran claiming responsibility for explosions inside Iran. Jamshid Sharmahd has repeatedly denied his involvement in the violent acts attributed to him by the authorities,” the human rights organization noted.
Daughter Gazelle Sharmahd has advocated for her father’s freedom since his abduction in 2020, vocally condemning the Biden administration a year ago after a negotiation released five Americans imprisoned in Iran, apparently in exchange for the freeing of $6 billion in Iran’s assets. Biden administration officials insisted the payment was “not a ransom” despite widespread disapproval of the deal, while the loved ones of Americans and others left behind by the swap lamented that the Biden White House had abandoned them.
The $6 billion in freed assets preceded Iran’s proxy terrorist organization Hamas conducting one of its most devastating massacres in history, the killing of an estimated 1,200 people in the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, which also featured widespread atrocities including gang rape, mass abductions, torture, and the desecration of corpses.
Gazelle Sharmahd published a video on the social media site Instagram on Monday accompanied by an extensive rebuke to the “incompetent governments” of Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Schulz, where Sharmahd held citizenship.
“The German foreign ministry and US state department will talk to me shortly and I will assess if they have any proof that the cowardly jihadists of the occupying Islamic Regime have murdered you in fear of your very breath,” the younger Sharmahd noted, offering a list of questions for the governments in question.
“As an American-German national was brutally and shamelessly kidnapped, tortured, held hostage for 4 years and (if confirmed) murdered by the biggest terrorist Organisation in the world,” she wrote, “apparently for retaliation of Israeli strikes on the regime, this must have immediate and unmistakable grave consequences for them now.”
“Where is our president? The VP? The secretary? The German chancellor? No call?” she asked. “Are you seriously still going to ignore our family and leave even my father’s presumed corpses [sic] defenseless in terrorist hands? We do not want any statements or condolences that do not include the immediate return of my father (dead or alive) and a severe punishment for the Islamic Regime murderers.”
In other online comments Sharmahd condemned Biden’s deputy special envoy for Iran, Abram Paley, for not doing enough to protect her father, and the administration generally, saying it “did nothing” and tried to “shift responsibility” to Germany.
“YOU left him to die, while the Biden-Harris Administration handed $6 billion to his captors and, if confirmed, his murderers,” she accused.
Paley issued a statement this week calling the execution of Sharmahd “abhorrent” and an example of “transnational repression.”
“Mr Sharmahd should never have been imprisoned in the first place. His kidnapping and rendition, as well as sham trial and reports of torture, were reprehensible,” he asserted, claiming he “stands with his family.”
Gazelle Sharmahd had in previous statements noted that her father had “chosen” America as his ultimate home and had an extended family of U.S. citizens – and could have one day become a citizen had he not been abducted.
“My dad chose the United States as his home, worked hard, followed all the rules, belongs to a family of four generations around him of U.S. citizenship, lived here for 20 years as a tax-paying, law-abiding resident and would already have his citizenship if it wasn’t for the terrorists and qualifies as a U.S. national under the Levinson law,” Sharmahd told Fox News in 2023.
In September 2023, shortly after the hostage deal that gifted Iran $6 billion, Gazelle Sharmahd granted an interview to the Emirati newspaper The National, accusing Biden of having “left [her father] behind to die” and calling the hostage deal “horrific.”
“I am happy for the freedom of every unjustly detained, but my happiness is overshadowed by the immense amount of injustice and threat this negotiation has brought upon the … dozens of other hostages that were left behind,” she said at the time, noting that she had evidence Iran had tortured her father “year after year in solitary confinement.”
“Our government has failed to explain that when you release an unprecedented amount of money for a few hostages, what do you plan to do now to free the ones you abandon in this negotiation?” she asked. “Instead of wasting your time on national TV trying to convince us that our hostage takers will use the money for humanitarian reasons, explain to us how and when will you bring Jimmy Sharmahd back home to us?”
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