Damaged cars at the site of the attack near the grave of General Qassem Soleimani in Kerman, southern Iran, January 3, 2024 (-)
Iran accused Israel and the United States of being behind the attack that killed at least 95 people on Wednesday near the grave of Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iranian military operations in the Middle East whose death Iran commemorated four years ago, state media reported.
The official Irna news agency initially reported a death toll of 103, while state television reported 211 injured, some of them in critical condition.
Health Minister Bahram Eynollahi later revised “the exact number of people killed in the terrorist attack” to 95, saying that some names were “inadvertently recorded twice.”
A double explosion occurred near the Saheb al-Zaman mosque, which houses the tomb of General Soleimani, in Kerman, southern Iran. There, a compact crowd of regime officials and anonymous people gathered for a ceremony.
A political adviser to the Iranian president accused Israel and the United States of being behind the attack.
“Washington says the United States and Israel played no role in the terrorist attack in Kerman, Iran. Really? A fox does not smell its own scent,” Mohammad Jamshidi wrote on X (ex-Twitter) on Wednesday.
“The responsibility for this crime lies with the American and Zionist regimes, and terrorism is just a tool,” he said.
The State Department in Washington, in turn, considered any suggestion of US or Israeli involvement in the attack to be “absurd.”
“The United States was not involved in any way. Any claim to the contrary is absurd,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said, adding: “We have no reason to believe that Israel is implicated.”
The attack “looks like a terrorist attack, something like ISIS has done in the past,” a senior U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
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Iran's arch-enemy Israel did not comment on the attack. “We are focused on the fight with Hamas,” army spokesman Daniel Hagari said in response to a question.
The attack, which was not immediately claimed, came in a very tense regional context since the conflict between Israel and Hamas began in Gaza nearly three months ago and the day after the elimination of a senior member of the Palestinian Islamist movement in an airstrike in near Beirut.
According to IRNA, a first explosion occurred 700 meters from Soleimani's grave, the second a kilometer further.
Videos posted on social media showed participants desperately trying to leave the site as security personnel cordoned off the area. In other videos you can see people running, panicking and being disoriented.
The Iranian government declared Thursday after the attack a “national day of mourning throughout the country,” the deadliest in Iran since 1978, when an arson attack at a cinema in Abadan killed at least 377 people, according to Iranian archives. 'AFP.
As night fell, many people returned to Kerman Cemetery shouting “Death to Israel!” and “Death to America!” Thousands of people gathered in Tehran to pay tribute to Soleimani.
“We condemn today's terrible terrorist attack (…) I hope that the perpetrators of this crime will be identified and punished for their actions,” said Zeinab, General Soleimani's daughter.
– “Serious reaction” –
For his part, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised a “tough response” to the attack, which was condemned as a “heinous and cowardly” act by President Ebrahim Raïssi, who canceled a trip to Turkey planned for Thursday after the attack state media.
For its part, the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas condemned a “terrorist act (…) aimed at destabilizing the security of the Islamic Republic in the service of the agenda of the Zionist entity (Israel)”.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned an attack that was “shocking in its cruelty and cynicism,” and the secretaries general of the United Nations, the European Union, France, Germany, Jordan and Saudi Arabia also condemned the attack.
– “Living Martyr” –
Qassem Soleimani was killed in an American drone strike in Iraq in January 2020 at the age of 62. A key figure in the Iranian regime, he was also one of the country's most popular figures.
According to the Iranian agency Tasnim, which cites well-informed sources, the explosions were caused by “bombs hidden in two bags.” “The perpetrators apparently activated the bombs using a remote control,” the same source said.
“We were walking towards the cemetery when suddenly a car stopped behind us and a trash can with a bomb exploded,” said a witness quoted by the Isna news agency.
According to the same agency, citing Kerman Mayor Said Tabrizi, the explosions occurred ten minutes apart.
Long considered a sworn enemy of the United States and its allies, Qassem Soleimani led the Quds Force, the external operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversaw military operations across the Middle East. East.
Soleimani was declared a “living martyr” during the lifetime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and was considered a hero for his role in the defeat of the Islamic State jihadist group in Iraq and Syria.
Iran has already been the scene of attacks and bombings that have killed dozens of people. Several of these were claimed by groups Tehran labeled “terrorists.”
In 2019, a suicide car bomb attack on a Revolutionary Guard bus then claimed by Jaish al-Adl, a jihadist group founded in 2012, killed 27 soldiers in the southeast of the country.
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