KUWAIT CITY:
Thousands of Kuwaitis braved scorching summer heat on Saturday to attend the funerals of 18 out of 26 victims of a Shia mosque bombing claimed by the self-styled Islamic State.
The bodies of the remaining eight victims will be flown late on Saturday to Najaf in Iraq for burial there, State Minister for Cabinet Affairs Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah Al-Sabah said.
Drapped in Kuwaiti flags, the bodies were borne by mourners who chanted religious slogans.
Mourners turned out in large numbers despite the Ramazan daylight fast and as temperatures hit 45 degrees Celsius.
“This crowd is the proof that the objectives of the criminal act have failed,” parliament speaker Marzouk al-Ghanem told reporters as he led a large number of MPs and ministers to the cemetery west of Kuwait City.
The mourners, who included women clad in black Islamic dress, carried Kuwaiti flags in addition to black and green banners bearing religious slogans.
The interior ministry said in a statement on Saturday that 26 people and the suicide bomber were killed and 227 wounded in one of the country’s worst bombings and its first ever on a mosque.
The health ministry said that 40 wounded are still in hospital and the rest have been discharged. Two of the dead were Iranian, the Shia-dominated Islamic republic’s foreign ministry said.
