DOZENS DEAD, HURT IN WEDDING BLAST

Survivor says more than 1,000 guests were invited to ceremony in Kabul

More than 1,000 people had been invited to the ceremony in Kabul, where a suicide bomber struck. It could be the deadliest attack in Afghanistan’s capital this year.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN» A suicide-bomb blast ripped through a wedding party on a busy Saturday night in Afghanistan’s capital and dozens of people were killed or wounded, a government official said. More than 1,000 people had been invited, one witness said, as fears grew that it could be the deadliest attack in Kabul this year.

Interior Ministry spokesman Nusrat Rahimi told The Associated Press the attacker set off explosives among the wedding participants.

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

The blast occurred near the stage where musicians were, and “all the youths, children and all the people who were there were killed,” witness Gul Mohammad said. One of the wounded, Mohammad Toofan, said “a lot of guests were martyred.”

Officials were not expected to release a toll until daytime Sunday.

“There are so many dead and wounded,” said Ahmad Omid, a survivor who said about 1,200 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 that many in the minority Shiite Hazara community call home, shattered a period of relative calm.

On Aug. 7, a Taliban car bomb aimed at Afghan security forces detonated on the same road, killing 14 people and wounding 145 — most of them women, children and other civilians.

Kabul’s huge, brightly lit wedding halls are centers of community life in a city weary of decades of war, with thousands of dollars 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.