Jamshid Sharmahd: Iran could execute my dad at any time, says German woman

It was the middle of the night when the phone call came.

Gazelle Sharmahd was woken up by her mother, who told her that her father, Jamshid, was calling from his jail cell in Iran. Gazelle hadn't been allowed to talk to her father, an Iranian-German businessman, for two years.

"We didn't even know if he'd already been executed and they hadn't told us," she told me from her home in Los Angeles a few days later.

Iran sentenced Jamshid Sharmahd to death last February for so-called "corruption on Earth" - a vague catch-all term the Iranian regime uses for any expression of opposition. Amnesty International condemned his trial as a sham. read more