Dozens killed, injured in blast

Suicide bomber targets 1200 in Kabul wedding hall

Asuicide-bomb blast ripped through a wedding party in Afghanistan’s capital yesterday, wounding or killing dozens of people, a government official said.

More than 1000 people had been invited to the wedding, one witness said, as fears grew that it could be the deadliest attack in Kabul this year. An official later said at least 63 people had died and 182 were wounded.

Interior Ministry spokesman Nusrat Rahimi said the attacker set off explosives among the guests.

The Taliban and a local affiliate of the Islamic State group carry out bloody attacks in the capital.

The blast was near the stage where musicians were and “all the youths, children and all the people who were there were killed”, witness Gul Mohammad said.

“There are so many dead and wounded,” said Ahmad Omid, a survivor who said about 1200 guests had been invited to the wedding for his father’s cousin. “I was with the groom in the other room when we heard the blast and then I couldn’t find anyone. Everyone was lying all around the hall.”

Outside a hospital, families wailed. Others were covered in blood.

The blast at the Dubai City wedding hall in western Kabul, a part of the city many in the minority Shiite Hazara community call home, shattered a period of relative calm. On August 7, a Taliban car bomb aimed at Afghan security forces detonated on the same road, killing 14 people and wounding 145, most of them civilians.

Kabul’s huge, brightly lit wedding

halls are centres of community life in a city weary of decades of war, and thousands of dollars are spent on a single evening.

“Devastated by the news of a suicide attack inside a wedding hall in Kabul. A heinous crime against our people; how is it possible to train a human and ask him to go and blow himself [up] inside a wedding?!!” Sediq Seddiqi, spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, said in a Twitter post.

The wedding halls also serve as meeting places. In November last year at least 55 people were killed when a suicide bomber sneaked into a Kabul wedding hall where hundreds of Muslim religious scholars and clerics had gathered to

mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. The Taliban denied involvement in an attack that bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State affiliate.

Saturday night’s explosion came a few days after the end of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, and just before Afghanistan marks its 100th independence day.

The blast comes at a greatly uncertain time in Afghanistan as the United States and the Taliban near a deal to end a nearly 18-year war, America’s longest conflict.

The conflict continues to take a horrific toll on civilians.

Last year more than 3800 were killed in Afghanistan, the UN said.