Two explosions minutes apart at a commemoration in Iran for a prominent general who died in a US drone strike in 2020 killed at least 95 people and injured more than 211 others on Wednesday.
The blasts came as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for what Iranian state media called a “terroristic” attack shortly after the explosions in Kerman, about 510 miles (820km) south-east of the capital, Tehran.
While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over its nuclear programme, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass-casualty bombings.
Sunni extremist groups, including Islamic State, have carried out large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.
Iranian state television quoted Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for the country’s emergency services, as the source of the casualty figures.
The blasts struck an event marking the the fourth anniversary of the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Wednesday’s explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman, and authorities said some people were injured while fleeing afterwards.
Footage suggested that the second blast occurred some 15 minutes after the first. A delayed second explosion is often used by militants to target emergency personnel responding to the scene and inflict more casualties.
People could be heard screaming in state TV footage.
Kerman’s deputy governor, Rahman Jalali, called the attack “terroristic”, without elaborating.
Iran has multiple foes who could be behind the assault, including exile groups, militant organisations and state actors. Iran has supported Hamas as well as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Gen Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional military activities and is hailed as a national hero among supporters of Iran’s theocracy.
He also helped secure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him turned into a civil, and later a regional, war that still rages today.
Relatively unknown in Iran until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Gen Soleimani’s popularity and mystique grew after American officials called for his killing over his help arming militants with penetrating roadside bombs that killed and maimed US troops.
A decade and a half later, he had become Iran’s most recognisable battlefield commander, ignoring calls to enter politics but growing as powerful, if not more, than its civilian leadership.
Ultimately, a drone strike launched by the Trump administration killed the general, part of escalating incidents that followed America’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Gen Soleimani’s death has drawn large processions in the past.
At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession.
