Afghanistan's Karzai led to safety after gunfire scare

KABUL, Sep 9 (Reuters) Afghan President Hamid Karzai broke off from a speech and was hustled safely away from a ceremony at Kabul's sports stadium today after what sounded like gunshots in the vicinity, witnesses said.

State television showed Karzai, who has survived several assassination attempts in recent years by suspected Taliban members, being led from the stadium by his US-trained bodyguards.

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.

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 stadium.

Violence has escalated in Afghanistan in recent months. The United Nations said on Sunday that 103 suicide attacks were carried out between January and the end of April this year, a record.

REUTERS RS AS1252