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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 announcement.
The execution, announced on Monday, had already provoked tit-for-tat diplomatic protests, 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.
The closures will affect a total of 32 consular staff, according to the foreign ministry.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry responded Thursday evening, denouncing the “irrational decision” that “cannot be justified,” and said it had summoned Berlin’s ambassador to Tehran to convey Iran’s “strong protest.”
Baerbock did not mention Iran’s embassy in Berlin but said Germany would “continue to maintain our diplomatic channels and our embassy in Tehran.”
Among other reasons, this was necessary in order for the government to continue to press for the release of the other German citizens whom “the regime is unjustly detaining,” she said.
Sharmahd, 69, had been sentenced to death in February 2023 for the capital offense 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 and Amnesty International said he had been the victim of a “show trial.”
But Iran has defended his execution and declared that “a German passport does not provide impunity to anyone, let alone a terrorist criminal.”
Germany is also understood to be pushing for further sanctions against Iran at the EU level.
“In Brussels I have been pushing for the Revolutionary Guards to be listed as a terror organization,” Baerbock said on Thursday.
The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell earlier this week said the bloc condemned Sharmahd’s “killing in the strongest possible terms” and was “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 criticized the Islamic republic’s leadership.