SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan, 10 December 2003 — Taleban officials said their fighters killed a Pakistani engineer in southern Afghanistan this week and accused two kidnapped Indian road workers of being intelligence agents who were also likely to be killed.

But a provincial governor said he believed the murder of Pakistani Anwar Shah was a criminal rather than political act, and cast doubt on the Taleban’s claim.

Shah was killed and another Pakistani wounded when a group of armed men ambushed their car in southern Afghanistan on Monday. The two Indians were abducted from a US-funded road project on Saturday.

Mullah Sabir Momin, the Taleban’s deputy operations commander in the south of Afghanistan, said Shah was killed by Taleban fighters because he was an “American agent”.

“We have repeatedly said that no work should be done in Afghanistan in the presence of Americans,” he said in a telephone call to Reuters late on Monday. “It does not matter whether those involved in such works are engineers, drivers, doctors or others.

“Anyone who assists America or the Afghan government is liable to death. American agents will not be spared even if they are Muslims. They will be killed at an appropriate time.” Taleban intelligence official Mullah Abdul Samad said the two Indians, a soil sampler named Murali and a foreman named Vardharai, employed on the Kandahar-Kabul road, were Indian intelligence agents. Both names are Hindu.

He said documents and maps found on them showed they were involved in bomb blasts at the Afghan-Pakistan border to damage relations between the countries. “The construction work on the Kandahar-Kabul highway was just a charade to disguise their activities,” he said.

He said a final decision about the Indian engineers would be taken by the Taleban leadership, but added: “I think there is a great possibility that they will be killed.”

C.S. Sethi, managing director of the firm BSC-C&C (JV), appealed for their release and told Reuters he wanted to make contact with their captors.

“These boys have nothing to do with any kind of politics and had never left the camp until Saturday.”