An explosion at a cemetery in Iran where a ceremony was being held to mark the 2020 assassination of Iran’s top commander has killed more than 100 people, it has been reported.
Iranian state media reported two explosions at the site in the city of Kerman where the former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani is buried.
Babak Yektaparast, a spokesperson for Iran’s emergency services, earlier told Iranian media that 73 people had been killed and 170 injured.
Iranian state television later reported that 103 people had died.
Kerman’s deputy governor, Rahman Jalali, described the blasts as “terroristic attacks”, state television reported, without elaborating on who could be behind them.
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Qassem Soleimani. File pic
Footage has emerged which suggests that the second blast occurred some 15 minutes after the first.
Kerman Mayor, Saeed Tabrizi, reportedly told Iran’s state-run ISNA news agency that the blasts took place around 10 minutes apart.
It comes a day after Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al Arouri died in an explosion in Beirut.
Smoke rises in the background following the explosions. Pic: SNNTV
An ambulance arrives at the scene
Second in command
Soleimani, once Iran’s top military general, was assassinated in a US drone strike during a visit to Iraq in 2020 to meet then-prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.
The drone strike caused a major diplomatic crisis between the US and Iran, leading to retaliatory rocket strikes against US military sites in Iraq and pushing the two countries to the brink of war.
More than a million people took to the streets for Soleimani’s funeral – leading to a stampede in which 56 mourners were killed.
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Having served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Soleimani became one of the country’s top commanders.
A national hero to supporters of Iran’s theocratic regime, he was often touted as the country’s second most powerful figure, behind only Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
He was the commander of the Quds Force – a division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Cops responsible for spying and military operations outside of Iran.
More than a million people took to the streets for the funeral (pictured) of Soleimani following his assassination in 2020
The group was deemed a terrorist organisation by the US.
They claimed Soleimani oversaw Quds Force officers as they tried and failed to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US Adel al Jubeir at the upscale Cafe Milano in Washington in 2011.
Soleimani was also regarded as the mastermind of Iran’s military operations in Iraq and Syria and influential in the development of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – categorised as the “Axis of Evil” by Western officials – involving Iran and Iranian-backed militias including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
