By Emmanuel Nduka
The United States has said it was not in any way involved in the explosions in Iran on Wednesday that killed at least 100 persons.
The US also said it has no reason to believe Israel was responsible, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told a regular news briefing.
Heritage Times HT had reported that two explosions killed more than 100 people and wounded scores at a ceremony in Iran earlier on Wednesday.
Iranian officials blamed unspecified “terrorists.” Mourners had gathered near the Saheb al-Zaman Mosque in the southern Iranian city of Kerman to commemorate Revolutionary Guards General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed exactly four years ago by a US drone strike close to Baghdad International Airport.
“The United States was not involved in any way, and any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous.
“We have no reason to believe that Israel was involved in this explosion.
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“We do express our sympathies to the victims and their loved ones who died in this horrific explosion,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said of Wednesday’s violence.
The blast on the anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination comes one day after a suspected Israeli attack killed the deputy political leader of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, in the southern suburbs of Beirut that are a stronghold of the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement.
Miller warned against further escalation in the region. “It is in no one’s interest — not in the interest of any country in the region, not in the interest of any country in the world — to see this conflict escalated any further than it already is,” he said, and further declined to assess who carried out the attack in Iran.
Soleimani, who headed an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guards, was also a staunch enemy of the Islamic State group, a Sunni extremist movement which has carried out attacks in majority-Shiite Iran.
He was killed four years ago at the Baghdad airport in a strike ordered by then president Donald Trump following attacks on US forces in the country by Shiite militias linked to Iran.
Iran strongly backs Hamas, the militant movement which runs the Gaza Strip.
The war was ignited last year after Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel on October 7, killing around 1,140 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Responding to the deadliest attack in its history, Israel launched a relentless offensive that has reduced vast swathes of Gaza to rubble and claimed over 22,300 lives, according Gaza’s health ministry.
