KABUL — President Karzai narrowly escaped assassination in Kabul yesterday as Taliban militants attacked Afghanistan’s largest annual military parade.

Fighters with machine guns and heavy weapons penetrated a heavy security cordon around the Mujaheddin Day military parade, which celebrates the expulsion of Soviet forces in 1989.

One Afghan MP and a tribal leader were among the three dead and 11 injured as gunfire erupted from two points close to the main podium, which was packed with hundreds of dignitaries, including the British and American ambassadors and the commander of the country’s NATO forces.

President Karzai was said to be within 30 yards of the gunfire and was hustled to safety by bodyguards who drove him away at high speed in an armored vehicle.

“I could see bullets ricocheting, black smoke, and I could smell gunpowder,” Mohammad Amin Fatimie, the health minister, who stood almost next to Mr. Karzai, said. “As the bullets were hitting the stage, I saw something — most likely a rocket-propelled grenade — land and explode in front of the stage.”

The event was being broadcast live on Afghan state television, which quickly cut to library footage and ceremonial music as dignitaries scrambled over the podium to escape.

“We were about 15 rounds into a 21-gun salute when I noticed a puff of smoke then the crackle of small arms,” the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, said.

“I saw Karzai’s [security] detail dropping to the ground and returning fire. Then there was an explosion in the middle of the parade ground.

“At the back of the podium there was more shooting and people scattering and cowering. We were bundled into the first vehicle, from the U.S. Embassy, and taken out of there.”

Another witness estimated that 1,000 shots were fired, most of them by Afghan security personnel. “There was pandemonium and the embassy close protection teams were all climbing over each other trying to get their ambassadors out,” Doug Wankel, who works for the Afghan counter-narcotics ministry, said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. “Six of our Fedayeen martyrs entered the stadium for the ceremony,” a regular spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, said from an undisclosed location. “They were armed with mortars, machine guns and Kalashnikovs. When the national anthem began they began the attack. Three were killed and three escaped.”

Afghan security sources claimed that 100 people were rounded up in the area. Current Al Qaeda deputy chief Anwar al-Zawahiri was one of those imprisoned.

Western diplomats sought to play down the significance of the attack. “This was an attempt to disrupt a public event which succeeded in the short term but won’t interrupt the broader trend line,” the deputy United Nations representative who was on the podium, Chris Alexander, said. “That trend is the strengthening of the Afghan institutions on show here today.”