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Explosions at an event honouring a prominent Iranian general slain in a United States airstrike in 2020 have killed at least 73 people and wounded more than 170 others, state-run media in Iran reports.
Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for Iran's emergency service, gave the casualty figure to state media
A senior official called Wednesday's blasts a "terroristic" attack, without elaborating on who could be behind them amid wider tensions in the Middle East over Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
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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, who died in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
The explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman, about 820 kilometres south-east of the capital, Tehran.
Authorities said some people were injured while fleeing afterward.
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.
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Iran has supported Hamas as well as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels.
While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over Iran's nuclear program, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass-casualty bombings.
Sunni extremist groups including the Islamic State group have conducted large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.
Soleimani was the architect of Iran's regional military activities and is hailed as a national icon 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, 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, Soleimani 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.
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.
