Body of German-Iranian dissident autopsied in Germany

German authorities said Wednesday they had carried out an autopsy on the body of the Iran-born German citizen Jamshid Sharmahd, who died in Iran last year in unclear circumstances.

The dissident, whose body was only recently released by Iran, had been held in the country since 2020 and sentenced to death on terror charges.

Iranian authorities announced Sharmahd's execution at the end of October but revised their account a week later, saying he had died before his sentence could be carried out.

Sharmahd's death caused outrage in Germany and sparked a diplomatic dispute with Iran, during which Berlin closed its three consulates in the country.

The German foreign ministry said Wednesday that the transfer of Sharmahd's remains several months after his death was "the result of intensive diplomatic and consular efforts at various levels".

Sharmahd's corpse had "been autopsied", a spokesman for the Brandenburg regional prosecutor's office charged with the investigation told AFP.

The results were "not yet available" and there were "currently no plans to publish the autopsy report", the spokesman said.

Sharmahd, 69, 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.

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

Iranian authorities sentenced Sharmahd to death in February 2023 for the capital offence of "corruption on Earth", a ruling 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".