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.