A SUICIDE-BOMB blast ripped through a wedding party on a busy Saturday night in Afghanistan’s capital, leaving at least 63 dead and almost 200 injured.

The Taliban denied responsibility for the blast at a western Kabul wedding hall, in a minority Shiite neighborhood, packed with more than 1,000 people celebrating a marriage.

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

He later said 63 people had died and 182 were wounded in the attack. “Among the wounded are women and children,” he added.

Both the Taliban and a local affiliate of the Islamic State 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 that “a lot of guests were martyred.”

“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.”

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.

The wedding halls also serve as meeting places, and in November 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 the attack that bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State affiliate.

(SD-Agencies)