The Pakistani engineer Anwar 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 Taliban's deputy operations commander in the south of Afghanistan, said Shah was killed by Taliban 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."

Taliban 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.

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.