On the fourth anniversary of the death of Iranian General Ghassem Soleimani, two heavy explosions occurred in his hometown of Kerman near his grave on Wednesday. The government in Tehran called it a terrorist attack, which was the deadliest attack in the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The explosions took place along a route leading to the grave of General Qassem Soleimani, as people had gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of his death. The first blast occurred 1.5km away from General Soleimani’s burial site. The second one took place at a 2.7km distance from the site.

Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that a suicide attack is to blame for one of the two explosions that killed dozens in Iran’s southeastern city on Wednesday.

According to the report, an informed source said on Thursday that evidence, including CCTV videos, shows that the first explosion was definitely caused by a suicide bombing conducted by a man.

One day after the attack at a memorial service for General Ghassem Soleimani in Kerman, the Iranian emergency services have revised the death toll downwards. According to IRNA, the chairman of the national rescue service, Jafar Miadfar, said on Thursday that 84 people had been killed and 284 injured.

State media had initially given the death toll as 103 on Wednesday, but Health Minister Bahram Eynollahi corrected it to 95 in the evening. Miadfar explained the confusion surrounding the casualty figures with the devastating condition in which some of the bodies were found after the explosions.

According to IRNA, an investigation is underway to identify the bomber whose body was ripped into pieces, and a probe is also being conducted to determine the cause of the second blast.

Qassem Soleimani was commander of the Al-Quds Brigades and was killed in January 2020 at the age of 62 in a drone attack at Baghdad airport ordered by then US President Donald Trump. The general was one of Tehran's most important figures both in Iran and abroad. He led Iran's foreign operations and played an important role in Iran's growing influence in the Middle East. Among other things, he strengthened the ties between the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Syrian Assad government and the militias in Iran. The Al-Quds Brigades, which he commanded, also maintain close relations with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Soleimani led Al-Quds Brigades cells in Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, India and Turkey. Soleimani became head of the Al-Quds Brigades in 1998. Since then, Western, Israeli and Arab secret services have tried to kill him. According to a 2017 assessment by former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Soleimani was "a cross between James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga" for the Shiites in the Middle East. The Times named him one of the hundred most important people in the world. In Iran, he was cheered like a star by his supporters.