Warning shots were fired outside the presidential palace in Kabul Wednesday, where thousands of people are protesting the gruesome beheadings of seven Shiite Hazaras, Afghan police said.
"Warning shots have been fired in the air, the demonstrators are dispersing, nobody has been injured," Kabul's deputy police chief Sayed Gul Agha Rohani told AFP. He did not clarify who had fired the shots or why.
The protesters have been camped outside the palace, mostly peacefully, since earlier Wednesday, after marching through the streets of the Afghan capital bearing the bodies of the dead in coffins draped in green.
The massive demonstration, unusual in Afghanistan for its size and organisation, came as the United Nations said the decapitation of the ethnic minority Hazaras may amount to a war crime.
The bodies of the seven victims -- including two women and a child -- were discovered in Zabul province on Saturday, but the circumstances surrounding their deaths remains unclear.