On 7 January 2020, a funeral gathering was held for Qassem Suleimani in his hometown of Kerman attracting several hundred thousand mourners many of whom were  bused from across Iran.

Footage from Soleimani’s funeral in Kerman shows mourners throwing items at the cortege to be blessed through contact with his casket pic.twitter.com/1JgKwFuG22

— BBC Monitoring (@BBCMonitoring) January 7, 2020

The event was marked by a stampede in which as many as a hundred people according to some sources may have been killed, while several hundred were injured. According to Al Jazeera, Iranian State television was reporting that at least 56 mourners had been killed in the resulting crush.

Gulbakh Bahrami, a journalist and presenter at Kurdistan 24 posted a couple of harrowing videos from the scene, one of which showed victims still alive piled atop each other in which appears to be a passageway, with those around them seemingly helpless to rescue those being asphyxiated. In another members of the public were attempting to perform CPR on the victims. It appears as though authorities upon learning of the crush curtailed elements of the ceremony.

Another video from #kerman.
More than 40 people have died in the stampede during the funeral of Soleimani in Kerman. Hospital officials have told some news agencies that the death toll is more than 100.Most of them were security forces and their families. @mdubowitz @marcorubio pic.twitter.com/41SKGzVVyJ

— Gulbakh Bahrami (@GolbaxB) January 7, 2020

#BREAKING
35 killed, 48 wounded during a stampede at #Soleimani’s funeral in his home town of Kerman in #Iran.@realDonaldTrump @mdubowitz @SecondLady @sfrantzman pic.twitter.com/JSJgpPFpWM

— Gulbakh Bahrami (@GolbaxB) January 7, 2020

Picture by Ayoub Hosseinsangi – Tasnim News Agency, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link. The picture is from the funeral service at Ahvaz, Iran on 5 January 2020.