AT LEAST 103 people were killed and 188 wounded in Iran today as explosions struck an event marking four years since the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani.

Crowds had gathered to mark the anniversary near his grave in Kerman, a city about 500 miles south-east of Tehran.

Iranian officials described the deadly blasts as a terrorist attack, though it was not immediately clear who was behind it. Iranian media reported that two briefcases stuffed with explosives had been placed at the entrance to the cemetery and detonated remotely, one 15 minutes after the other — a tactic used by some terrorist organisations to kill emergency service workers responding to the first attack.

Red Crescent aid workers said crowds were crammed along roads leading to the cemetery, hindering access for ambulance crews. Footage showed people screaming and fleeing the area as security forces cordoned off the graveyard.

The blasts came a day after Israel assassinated a senior Hamas official in Lebanon. Tel Aviv has a record of assassinating individuals, usually scientists, within Iran, but not of terrorist attacks on crowds in the country. 

That may point to the attack coming from a Sunni jihadist outfit such as Islamic State (Isis), which does carry out mass killings of Shi’ite Muslims.

In any case, the attack is certain to raise tensions in a region teetering on the brink of war, with an Iranian warship having squared up against the US navy in the Red Sea following clashes between US ships and those of Yemen’s Houthi movement, which Iran supports. 

Soleimani, who headed the Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds (Jerusalem) force, responsible for intelligence and special ops, is an iconic figure among supporters of Iran’s theocratic regime. The press at his 2020 funeral was so tight that it sparked a stampede that crushed 56 people to death.

He was killed by a US drone while a guest of the Iraqi government, sparking a diplomatic crisis and a vote by Iraq’s parliament to expel all US troops from the country, which the US and Iraqi governments ignored.