KABUL: A suicide bomber blew himself up among guests at a wedding hall Saturday in northern Afghanistan, killing 23 people including a prominent ex-Uzbek warlord turned lawmaker who was the father of the bride.        

The attack was the latest to target top figures from the country’s minority groups and dealt a blow to efforts to unify ethnic factions amid growing concerns that the country could descend into civil war after foreign combat troops withdraw in 2014.

Ahmad Khan Samangani, an ethnic Uzbek who commanded forces fighting the Soviets in the 1980s and later became a member of parliament, was welcoming guests to his daughter's wedding Saturday morning when the blast ripped through the building in Aybak, the capital of Samangan province.

Three Afghan security force officials also were among those killed.

About 60 other people, including government officials, were wounded in the attack, which left the wedding hall’s black-and-white tile floor covered with shattered glass, blood and other debris.

Chairs adorned with pink fabric lay strewn across the site. Dead bodies were piled into the back of Afghan security force vehicles. Afghan Army helicopters ferried some of the wounded from the wedding hall, which has a facade of pillars painted a festive light green and pink.

The bride and groom survived, but never got the chance to exchange vows.

An eyewitness described a gruesome scene after the explosion.

“I came out and saw 40 to 50 people everywhere on the ground, wounded and killed,”said Salahuddin, who uses one name which is common in Afghanistan.

“I could not exactly count the number of people killed. I could see people with missing legs and body parts all around me.”

It was the latest in a string of deadly attacks around the country that threaten to undermine international hopes of an orderly handover to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.

In one of the worst, Taliban fighters attacked a lakeside hotel north of Kabul on June 22, killing 18 people.

Two days earlier, a suicide bomber killed 21 people, including three US soldiers, in the eastern city of Khost.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Saturday's attack.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told the Associated Press in a phone call that the Taliban neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attack.

In announcing their spring offensive on May 2, the Taliban said they would continue to target those who back the Karzai government and the US-led international military coalition.

Jan Kubis, the United Nation’s top official in Afghanistan, said the UN had documented an increase in the number of government and elected officials who have been targeted by militants in the past six months.

He did not provide statistics, but two government officials were assassinated on Friday, the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs director in Laghman province and the mayor of Shindand district in Herat province.

“Such inhumane brutality that is against the teachings of Islam and against international law should stop immediately,” Kubis said in a statement.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the bombing, saying it was “carried out by the enemies of Afghanistan.”

He ordered a team from Kabul to fly to the area to investigate.

Karzai needs minority groups _ loosely known as the Northern Alliance, to back his efforts to reconcile with the Taliban who are mostly from the majority Pashtun ethnic group.

While Pashtuns make up 42 per cent of the population, collectively the minority Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and other smaller groups outnumber them.

Without minority support, the country risks a de facto partition into a Pashtun south and a “minority” north.

Minorities aren’t against finding a political resolution to the decade-long war, but worry that Karzai, a Pashtun, will make too many concessions to the Taliban to achieve a peace deal.

Many commanders from the minority groups fought the Taliban after they seized Kabul in 1996 and joined with the US to oust the hardline Islamic movement from power in the 2001 US-led invasion.

Whatever support for peace talks that Karzai has won from minority groups is likely to erode if militants continue to pick off their leaders one by one.

The death of Samangani was the latest of a handful of Northern Alliance and other minority leaders assassinated in the past two years.

One of the most prominent was Gen. Daud Daud, an ethnic Tajik, who oversaw police activities in nine northern provinces and was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in May 2011.

Daud had also served as governor of Takhar province in the north, deputy interior minister for counternarcotics and was a former bodyguard of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance commander who was killed in an al Qaeda suicide bombing two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Makhdum Muhibullah Furqani, a lawmaker from Samangan, said the attack was likely organized by the Taliban or by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.