More than 300 people anxiously waited outside the Emergency Hospital, one of the main trauma centers in the city. Some were weeping and wailing, while others were trying to look up names of loved ones on the lists that employees handed out. Inside the hospital, where the windows had also been shattered by the force of the blast, doctors were attending to dozens of wounded.

Outside Wazir Akbar Khan hospital, the main government hospital, a white-bearded man in his 60s named Azizullah searched for news of his 22-year-old son, Abdullah, who worked at a telecommunications company near the site of the blast.

“I searched all hospitals. He is nowhere,” said Mr. Azizullah, who would crouch and then get up to pace. “Abdullah has two children, a wife and an old mother. What will I tell them?”

Mr. Azizullah received a call from someone who appeared to be inside the hospital, telling him about unrecognizable bodies.

“Can you search the person whose body is cut up?” he asked the caller. “He may be my son. Try to find his documents.”

By the morgue in the hospital, a group of men tried to figure out whether the badly burned body in the back of an ambulance was their friend Ahmad Reshad, an employee of a telecom company in his 30s. One of the men was on the phone with Mr. Reshad’s wife, as others searched the body to try to make out details that could identify him: How much money was carrying? What color tie did he have on? The body had pills in one of his pockets — was Mr. Reshad carrying pills?

They could not identify the body, so it was shipped off for a forensic examination. The men continued their search at another hospital.