An Indian hostage's beheaded body was found in southern Afghanistan on
Sunday, officials said. Taliban militants said they shot the hostage dead as he
tried to escape.
K. Manjula, wife of K.
SuryaNarayan, an Indian engineer in Afghanistan who is being held hostage
by Taliban militants, holds her husband's portrait and cries in Hyderabad,
India, Saturday, April 29, 2006. The Indian hostage's beheaded body was
found in southern Afghanistan on Sunday April 30, 2006, officials said.
Taliban militants said they shot the hostage dead as he tried to escape.
[AP] |
An Afghan highway police patrol found the decapitated body and its head in
the Hassan Kariez district of Zabul province, the same area where Indian
telecommunications engineer K. Suryanarayana was abducted Friday, said
provincial police chief, Ghulam Nabi Malakhail.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office confirmed the engineer's
killing, the second of an Indian hostage in southern Afghanistan in the past six
months.
"The prime minister condemns the killing of an Indian civilian in Afghanistan
and expresses his grief and sorrow for the family," said Singh spokesman Sanjay
Baru. "The prime minister calls on the nation to remain unified in the face of
this terrorism."
Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who releases regular statements on behalf of outlawed
Taliban fighters, said militants shot Suryanarayana after he tried to escape and
fought with his captors.
Ahmadi issued a threat a day earlier saying Suryanarayana would be executed
unless all Indians left Afghanistan by 6 p.m. Sunday.
The Indian Embassy had sent a team, accompanied by Afghan officials and
co-workers of Suryanarayana, to Zabul to determine whether the beheaded body was
that of Suryanarayana, Indian Ambassador Rakesh Sood said.
Suryanarayana's wife, Manjula, collapsed on seeing reports of the body's
discovery, while her three children and dozens of well-wishers wailed and cried,
many of them clutching pictures of the missing engineer.
"He is the only son of his old parents. He has not done any harm to anybody,"
Manjula said at her home in Indian city of Hyderabad.
Suryanarayana, aged in his early 40s, had been employed in Afghanistan since
January by a Bahrain-based company, al-Moayed. The company has been contracted
by an Afghan mobile phone company, Roshan, to expand its mobile phone network
across volatile provinces in southern Afghanistan.
His kidnapping was the first here since four Macedonians of Albanian descent
were kidnapped and killed in March, purportedly by Taliban militants.
The Taliban abducted and killed another Indian in November. Truck driver
Maniappan Raman Kutty's almost decapitated body was dumped in another volatile
southern province, Nimroz.