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 70 people, it has been reported.
There were two explosions at the site in the city of Kerman where the former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani is buried, state media reports added.
Hundreds of people had reportedly gathered at the site.
There are conflicting reports about the number of people that have been killed.
A local official in the Kerman region has claimed more than 70 people have been killed, Reuters reports.
Babak Yektaparast, a spokesperson for Iran’s emergency services, later told state media that 73 people had been killed and 170 injured.
An Iranian official described the explosions as “terrorist attacks”, state media reported, without elaborating on who could be behind them.
It comes a day after Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al Arouri died in an explosion in Beirut.
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 the funeral – leading to a stampede in which 56 mourners were killed.
Having served in Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Soleimani became one of the country’s top commanders, often touted as Iran’s second most powerful figure, behind only Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei,
He was the commander of the Quds Force – an IRGC division responsible for spying and military operations outside of Iran.
Soleimani was regarded as the mastermind of Iran’s military operations in Iraq and Syria.
He was also regarded as influential in the development of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – categorised as the “Axis of Evil” by Western officials – involving Iranian-backed militias including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Please refresh the page for the fullest version.
You can receive Breaking News alerts on a smartphone or tablet via the Sky News App. You can also follow @SkyNews on X or subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up with the latest news.