Afghan President Hamid Karzai broke off from a speech and was escorted safely away from a ceremony at Kabul's sports arena today after shots were fired outside the stadium, a defence ministry spokesman said.
State television showed Karzai, who has survived several assassination attempts by suspected Taliban members, being led from the stadium by his US-trained bodyguards.
A government official told the audience to be calm, saying that what they had heard were not gunshots but stones being thrown by people who could not get into the heavily guarded arena.
However, defence ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi said shots were fired outside the stadium, though he did not know by whom or whether there were any casualties.
"Yes, shots were fired. The president is safe," he said.
Some witnesses said police had fired in the air to disperse those who wanted to force their way into the stadium, but there was no word of any casualties.
The ceremony was held to mark the sixth anniversary of the killing of Ahmad Shah Masood, the military leader of an anti-Taliban alliance, by a suspected al Qaeda suicide bomber two days before the September 11 attacks on the United States.
As Karzai was making his speech, a bodyguard stepped up and spoke to the president, TV showed. Karzai then walked away from the podium, asking his bodyguard, "What is the story?".
Separately, two British soldiers and more than 30 Taliban guerrillas were killed in separate incidents in southern Afghanistan, the British and US military said, the latest clashes in a raging insurgency.
In another incident in the same restive southern province of Helmand on Saturday, an Afghan employee of a US security firm was killed and three others were wounded in a suicide bomb attack, the Interior Ministry said today.
The British soldiers were killed while taking part in a pre-dawn operation on Saturday to disrupt the Taliban in Helmand when their patrol came under attack, the Ministry of Defence said.
Two other British troops were seriously wounded and several insurgents were killed, it added.
Afghan and US-led coalition forces backed by air strikes meanwhile killed more than 30 Taliban fighters in a separate clash in Helmand on Saturday, and destroyed a large cache of weaponry, the US military said.
"Afghan and Coalition forces found large weapons caches in three buildings and smaller caches in other buildings. The caches included rockets, anti-tank rockets, and an improvised explosive device, all of which were destroyed by a coalition airstrike," it said in a statement.
"During the course of operations, the combined force also returned small-arms fire and employed precision munitions on locations where suspected militants were hiding. Forces estimate more than 30 suspected militants were killed in the engagement."
There were no independent accounts of how many people were killed or what happened.
The Taliban were not immediately available for comment.