Dozens of people have been killed in a stampede in the south-eastern Iranian city of Kerman, where hundreds of thousands of mourners have gathered for the burial of the military commander Qassem Suleimani, according to state media.
Local TV reports said 35 people had been killed and another 48 injured in the crush. A video purportedly from the scene showed a number of mourners lying prostrate on the floor with others rubbing their chests or administering CPR. Some of those on the ground had their faces covered with jackets or scarves.
Mourners had filled the streets of Suleimani’s home town on Tuesday morning in numbers that appeared to match the huge turnouts in Baghdad, Tehran, Qom, Mashhad and Ahvaz in recent days to say farewell to the commander of the Revolutionary Guards external operations force, who was killed by a US drone strike in Iraq on Friday.
The crowds were the largest since those that turned out for the 1989 funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A Guardian correspondent in Tehran on Monday had reported being pressed on all sides by people for more than an hour during the funeral procession there and being overwhelmed by noise from the crowd and loudspeakers.
The burial ceremony scheduled for Tuesday afternoon was cancelled after the stampede, the head of the committee overseeing the process, Mehdi Sadafi, told the Isna news agency.
Addressing the sea of black-clad mourners before the deadly crush, the Revolutionary Guards’ commander, Maj Gen Hossein Salami, said: “The martyr Qassem Suleimani is more powerful … now that he is dead. The enemy killed him unjustly.”
Mirroring fierce threats of retaliation from across Iran’s leadership since Friday’s assassination, Salami threatened to “set ablaze” American interests in the region, drawing cries of “death to Israel” from the crowd.
People converged from across the region on Kerman’s Azadi Square, where two flag-draped coffins were on display, with the second reportedly containing the remains of Suleimani’s closest aide, Brig Gen Hossein Pourjafari.
“We’re here today to pay respects to the great commander of the holy defense,” said one of the mourners, who came from the southern city of Shiraz to attend the funeral in Kerman.
“Haj Qassem was not only loved in Kerman, or Iran, but also the whole world,” Hemmat Dehghan said. “The security of the whole world – Muslims, Shiites, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and especially Iran – all owe it to him,” the 56-year-old war veteran said.
Suleimani was killed outside Baghdad airport on Friday morning in a drone strike ordered by the US president, Donald Trump, ratcheting up tensions with arch-enemy Iran, which has vowed “severe revenge”.
The White House on Tuesday denied a visa to Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, preventing him from attending a UN Security Council meeting in New York scheduled for Thursday. “They fear that someone comes to the US and reveals realities,” Zarif said from Tehran.
The visa ban breaches a 1947 UN “headquarters agreement” under which the US is generally required to give foreign diplomats access to the country, even if they are restricted to the area around the site of the international organization.
Zarif has been subject to such restrictions in the past but Washington says it can deny visas outright for “security, terrorism and foreign policy” reasons.
The assassination of Suleimani, 62, heightened international concern about a new war in the volatile, oil-rich Middle East and rattled financial markets.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Tuesday that the country’s leaders had worked up 13 sets of plans to revenge the killing. The report quoted Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, saying that even the weakest among the reprisals would be a “historic nightmare” for the US. He declined to give details.
“If the US troops do not leave our region voluntarily and upright, we will do something to carry their bodies horizontally out,” Shamkhani said.
