An explosion ripped through a wedding hall on a busy Saturday night in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul and 63 fatalities were reported. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the blast, Reuters reported.
Interior Ministry spokesman Nusrat Rahimi told Associated Press there was no immediate information on the cause of the blast.
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 in the city.
On August 7, a Taliban car bomb aimed at Afghan security forces detonated on the same road in a busy west Kabul neighbourhood, killing 14 people and wounding 145 most of them women, children and other civilians.
Kabul's huge, brightly lit wedding halls are a centre of community life in a city weary of decades of war, with thousands of dollars spent on a single evening.
The halls also serve as meeting places, and in November at least 55 people were killed after 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.
"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.
-Inputs from PTI
