A stampede erupted on Tuesday at a funeral procession for Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general and arch-terrorist who was assassinated in a US airstrike last week, killing at least 40 people and injuring 213 others, state television reported.
According to the report, the stampede took place in Kerman, the hometown of the former Quds Force commander, as the procession got underway. Initial videos posted online showed people lying lifeless on a road, others shouting and trying to give them help.
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Iranian state TV gave the casualty toll in its online report, without saying where it obtained the information. Pirhossein Koulivand, the head of Iran's emergency medical services, earlier spoke by telephone to state TV and confirmed the stampede took place.
"Unfortunately as a result of the stampede, some of our compatriots have been injured and some have been killed during the funeral processions," he said.
Authorities later delayed Soleimani's burial, citing concerns about the massive crowd that had gathered, the semi-official ISNA news agency said. It did not say when the burial would take place.
A procession in Tehran on Monday drew over 1 million people in the Iranian capital, crowding both main thoroughfares and side streets in the city.
Soleimani's death has sparked calls across Iran for revenge against America.
Early Tuesday, the leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to "set ablaze" places supported by the United States, sparking cries from the crowd of supporters of "Death to Israel!" Hossein Salami made the pledge before a crowd of thousands gathered in a central square in Kerman before a casket carrying Soleimani's remains.
The outpouring of grief was an unprecedented honor for a man viewed by Iranians as a national hero for his work leading the Quds Force. The US blames him for the killing of American troops in Iraq and accused him of plotting new attacks just before his death Friday in a drone strike near Baghdad's airport. Soleimani also led forces in Syria backing President Bashar Assad in a long war, and he also served as the point man for Iranian proxies in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.
His slaying already has pushed Tehran to abandon the remaining limits of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers as his successor, Esmail Ghaani, and others vow to take revenge. In Baghdad, the Iraqi parliament called for the expulsion of all American troops, something analysts fear could allow Islamic State fighters to mount a comeback.
Speaking in Kerman, Salami praised Soleimani's exploits, describing him as essential to backing Palestinian terrorist groups, Yemen's Houthi rebels, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. As a martyr, Soleimani represented an even greater threat to Iran's enemies, Salami said.
"We will take revenge. We will set ablaze where they like," Salami said, drawing the cries of "Death to Israel!"
According to a report on Tuesday by the semi-official Tasnim news agency, Iran has worked up 13 sets of plans for revenge for Soleimani's killing. The report quoted Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, as saying that even the weakest among them would be a "historic nightmare" for the US. He declined to give any 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.
Iran's parliament, meanwhile, passed an urgent bill declaring the US military's command at the Pentagon and those acting on its behalf in Soleimani's killing as "terrorists," subject to Iranian sanctions. The measure appears to be an attempt to mirror a decision by US President Donald Trump in April to declare the Revolutionary Guards a "terrorist organization."
The US Defense Department used the Guards' designation as a terror organization in the US to support the strike that killed Soleimani. The decision by Iran's parliament, done by a special procedure to speed the bill to law, comes as officials across the country threaten to retaliate for Soleimani's killing.
The vote also saw lawmakers approve funding for the Quds Force with an additional 200 million euros, or about $223 million.
Soleimani will be buried later Tuesday between the graves of Enayatollah Talebizadeh and Mohammad Hossein Yousef Elahi, two former IRGC comrades. The two died in Operation Dawn 8 in Iran's 1980s war with Iraq in which Soleimani also took part, a 1986 amphibious assault that cut Iraq off from the Persian Gulf and led to the end of the bloody war that killed 1 million people.
