Qatar Blast Kills 1 Briton
A car bomb tore through a theater popular with Westerners in Qatar on Saturday, killing one person, officials said.
Twelve people were injured in the blast in the capital, Qatar’s Interior Ministry said. It gave no other details.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.
The British Foreign Office confirmed that the fatality was a British national, but did not identify the victim.
“One building at the theater collapsed. There was pandemonium in the area. It took firefighters some time to put out the fire,” Eric Mattey, a British diplomat in Doha, told Britain’s Sky television.
U.S. Army Capt. Eric Clark, who is based in Qatar, said he had spoken with a woman who was performing in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” when a blast shook the hall about 9:15 p.m.
“She heard a massive explosion and there was mass chaos and people just exited the building,” Clark said.
Such violence is rare in Qatar, a small, quiet country that plays host to the U.S. military’s Central Command.
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