AN IRANIAN monarchist has been sentenced to death, authorities said on Tuesday.

Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-German national and United States  resident, is the leader of the armed wing of a group called Kingdom Assembly of Iran which advocates the restoration of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Mr Sharmahd was accused of orchestrating a deadly bombing in 2008 of the Hosseini Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in Shiraz, in which 14 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded.

He has also been accused of spying on Iran’s ballistic missile programme for the US.

State TV has said that his group was also behind a 2010 bombing at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran that wounded several people.

Mr Sharmahd’s family has denied he was involved in any attacks and accused Iranian intelligence of abducting him from Dubai in 2020. 

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that the death sentence is “absolutely unacceptable” and that there would be a “clear reaction,” without elaborating.

Ms Baerbock said that Mr Sharmahd did not have “even the beginning of a fair trial” and that consular access and access to the trial had been “repeatedly denied.” She also said that he had been arrested “under highly questionable circumstances,” without elaborating.

A Middle East expert with Amnesty International’s German branch, Katja Muller-Fahlbusch, said that the organisation is “appalled by the death sentence.”

She said in a statement that the proceedings were “a show trial” and that “Iran withheld numerous rights from him, including the free choice of a lawyer.”

Iran has executed four men accused of violence linked to the ongoing protests that have rocked the country since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.

Ms Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress code.

Activists say at least 16 others have been sentenced to death.