DOHA, Qatar — A car bomb tore through a theater popular with Westerners during a performance yesterday in Qatar, killing one person, officials said.

Twelve other people were injured in the blast in the northern suburb, Qatar's Interior Ministry said in a statement. It gave no other details about the explosion.

The British Foreign Office confirmed the fatality was a British national but did not identify the victim.

A former Washington state resident, Katherine Birchall, was nicked by cement shards and temporarily deafened, but she escaped serious injury, her mother, Patricia Birchall of Point Roberts, Whatcom County, said in a phone interview with The Seattle Times last night.

Al-Arabiya satellite-news network, citing Qatari sources, reported that two people were killed and 16 injured in yesterday evening's blast at the Doha Players Theater.

"I saw people lying on the ground. I think they were in shock because of the explosion. They were mostly foreigners," said Ahmed Goudah, a witness who spoke from the scene.

Goudah said dozens of cars had shattered windows. Some were engulfed in flames.

Firefighters and emergency vehicles converged on the area, which was sealed off by police.

He said ambulances were seen carrying the injured and transferring them to hospitals.

U.S. Army Capt. Eric Clark, who is based in Qatar, said he spoke with a woman who was performing in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" when a blast shook the hall at about 9:15 p.m.

"She heard a massive explosion and there was mass chaos and people just exited the building," Clark said by telephone.

Katherine Birchall, a 29-year-old teacher, was chatting inside the theater after the show when the blast hit. Parts of the ceiling came crumbling down, and the lights went out, her mother recounted.

At first, a security guard said it was a natural-gas leak, according to the Birchalls.

Theater guests were evacuated. Birchall returned home to the apartment she shares with her father, Michael Birchall, who had left the show minutes before the blast.

Her hair was covered with paint chips, plaster and small cement pieces, her mother said.

Al-Jazeera Arab television quoted the Interior Ministry as saying that the car used in the explosion was owned by an Egyptian who left his home in the morning and had not returned.

Earlier, Gen. Ahmed Al-Hariki of the Interior Ministry told Al-Jazeera that the blast occurred at a restaurant inside the theater.

The theater is a popular venue for non-Qataris from Western and Arab countries and is in Farek Kelab, a northern suburb of the capital.

A British school is nearby. The U.S. Embassy is six miles away, and a U.S. military base is 12 miles away.

Eric Mattey, a spokesman for the British embassy in Doha, told Britain's Press Association news agency that a number of people outside the theater had been injured.

"We believe there have been some injuries but it was from flying glass more than anything else," he said.

Such violence is rare in Qatar, a small, quiet country with tight security. The last incident of this type was the February 2004 car-bomb assassination of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a rebel leader and former Chechen president who had lived in Qatar for several years.

A Qatari court later convicted two Russian intelligence officers of the murder and sentenced them to 25 years in prison.

Energy-rich Qatar is a close ally of the United States in the Gulf. The country is home to the U.S. Central Command's forward operations in the Middle East.

Michael Birchall, a longtime educator and consultant in the region, had left Saudi Arabia for Qatar after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his wife said.

Anti-American street marches are common in Doha, but Patricia Birchall called the bombing "significant" because it is the first such attack on Westerners, and carried out near a U.S. military center.

"We're not the most popular people in the world over there," she said.

Seattle Times reporter Mike Lindblom contributed to this article.