At least 56 dead and scores injured as thousands turn out for burial of general

Dozens of people have been killed in a crush during a funeral ceremony for the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners in his home city of Kerman.

The crush occurred as a burial procession for Suleimani, 62, was beginning on Tuesday morning. At least 56 people had been confirmed death by early evening local time with more than 200 injured, according to Iranian media reports.

Videos purportedly from the scene showed several mourners lying on the ground with people rubbing their chest, administering CPR or wailing beside them. Jacket and scarves covered the faces of some of the victims.

Eyewitnesses told BBC Persian the procession was held along narrow roads and that side-streets in some places had been closed, trapping the vast crowds in tiny areas where a disaster was foreseeable. “People had no way out,” one person said.

Another said the procession moving with Suleimani’s coffin was met with another group of mourners travelling in the opposing direction, causing some to fall and be crushed in the ensuing panic. “The path was very narrow and some people were coming from the opposite way, that’s why many people died,” they said.

Play Video 1:24 Iran: aerial footage shows tens of thousands at Qassem Suleimani's funeral in Kerman - video

Pirhossein Koulivand, head of Iran’s emergency medical services, told state media outlets: “Unfortunately as a result of the stampede, some of our compatriots have been injured and some have been killed during the funeral processions.”

Mourners had filled the streets of Kerman in number that appeared to match the huge turnouts in Baghdad, Tehran, Qom, Mashhad and Ahvaz in recent days to say farewell to the head 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 who attended the funeral procession in Tehran on Monday had reported being pressed on all sides by people for more than an hour and being overwhelmed by noise from the crowd and loudspeakers.

Suleimani’s burial was cancelled after the deaths, the head of the committee overseeing the ceremony, 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.”

Play Video 0:33 Footage shows ​packed crowds during Suleimani burial procession – video

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.

Profile Who was Qassem Suleimani? Show Hide Qassem Suleimani, killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad, had become well known among Iranians and was sometimes discussed as a future president. Many considered Suleimani to have been the second most powerful person in Iran, behind supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, but arguably ahead of President Hassan Rouhani. He was commander of the Quds Force, the elite, external wing of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the Trump administration designated as a terror organisation in April last year. He was born in Rabor, a city in eastern Iran, and forced to travel to a neighbouring city at age 13 and work to pay his father’s debts to the government of the Shah. By the time the monarch fell in 1979, Suleimani was committed to the clerical rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and joined the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary force established to prevent a coup against the newly declared Islamic Republic. Within two years, he was sent to the front to fight in the war against the invading Iraqi army. He quickly distinguished himself, especially for daring reconnaissance missions behind Iraqi lines, and the war also gave him his first contact with foreign militias of the kind he would wield to devastating effect in the decades to come. By the the time the Iraq government fell in 2003, Suleimani was the head of the Quds force and blamed for sponsoring the Shia militias who killed thousands of civilian Iraqis and coalition troops. As fighting raged on Iraq’s streets, Suleimani fought a shadow war with the US for leverage over the new Iraqi leadership. Once described by American commander David Petraeus as ‘a truly evil figure’, Suleimani was instrumental in crushing street protests in Iran in 2009. In recent months outbreaks of popular dissent in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran were again putting pressure on the crescent of influence he had spent the past two decades building. Violent crackdowns on the protests in Baghdad were blamed on militias under his influence.

Eighteen months before his death, Suleimani had issued Donald Trump a public warning, wagging his finger and dressed in olive fatigues. “You will start the war but we will end it.” Michael Safi Photograph: Mehdi Ghasemi/AFP

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 defence,” 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iranian mourners at the burial of Qassem Suleimani in Kerman. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

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 organisation.

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.

Suleimani’s assassination 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.

Profile Who has replaced Qassem Suleimani as al-Quds commander? Show Hide Following the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has appointed Suleimani's deputy, Esmail Qaani, as the new commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force. Little is known about his role in the Quds, a special operations force responsible for projecting Iranian military power overseas. Like Suleimani, the 62-year-old from Mashhad joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a young man in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

He worked for IRGC counterintelligence before being appointed as Suleimani’s second-in-command in 1997.

The pair are said to have been close friends. Both veterans of the brutal 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Iranian media quoted Qaani as saying their bond came from being “children of war”. Comments from an IRGC political deputy this week suggested the division of labour between the two meant while Suleimani focused on Quds operations in the Middle East in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, Qaani handled more bureaucratic affairs as well as relationship building with groups in Africa and Afghanistan. He was sanctioned by the US over funding international Quds Force activity and proxy forces in 2012. While Qaani is believed to be weaker and less charismatic than his predecessor, he has already echoed Khamenei in promising revenge for Sulemani’s death. Quds Force operations are likely to continue unchanged, as the group’s structure means it can rely on its institutional power rather than individual leaders. Bethan McKernan Photograph: -/AFP

On Monday the US air force launched a drill with 52 stealth bombers in Utah, just days after Trump threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites, including some important to Iranian culture, if Iran attacked US assets or citizens.

An urgent bill was meanwhile passed by Iran’s parliament declaring the US military’s command at the Pentagon in Washington and those acting on its behalf to be “terrorists”, subject to Iranian sanctions. The measure appears to mirror Trump’s decision in April to classify the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation.