Celebratory gunfire at a wedding party in eastern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday night brought down an electric cable, killing 23 people, a local civil defense official said.Guns only kill one or two people at a time at Arab weddings, so they are clearly not the problem. Non-bulletproof electric wiring is obviously the real danger to people at weddings.
"At the wedding, the cable fell on a metal door and the 23 people who died were all electrocuted," Eastern Province official Abdullah Khashman said by phone.
A photograph of the aftermath of the accident, published on local newspapers' websites showed a large courtyard strewn with fallen chairs and a pole in the middle supporting cables carrying lightbulbs.
All those killed were from the same tribe, Khashman said. Thirty others were injured in the incident near Abqaiq, a center of the Saudi energy industry.
Saudi Arabia banned the shooting of firearms at weddings, a popular tradition in tribal areas of the conservative Islamic kingdom, last month.
(h/t Ian, Ronald)