Agency

Kandahar, Jul 22: A purported Taliban spokesman said the hard-line militia killed two German hostages on Saturday because Germany didn't announce a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Afghan government, however, said one of the Germans died of a heart attack and that the second was still alive.
 
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who claims to be a Taliban spokesman, said fighters had fatally shot the Germans, who were kidnapped on Wednesday with five Afghan colleagues in the southern province of Wardak while working on a dam project.

"The German and Afghan governments didn't meet our conditions, they didn't pull out their troops," Ahmadi told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Ahmadi offered no proof of the killings and said the Taliban would give further information about the two bodies later.

The Afghan Foreign Ministry said he was lying. "The information that we and our security forces have is that one of these two who were kidnapped died of a heart attack," Foreign Ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen said. "The second hostage is alive and we hope that he will be released soon and we are trying our best to get him released."

German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jeager said a crisis team was pursuing "every clue" and was in close contact with the Afghan government.

Ahmadi said that 18 kidnapped Koreans would be killed on Saturday if South Korea didn't withdraw its 200 troops in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the South Korean government attempted to win the release of at least 18 Korean Christians, including 15 women, kidnapped in the same region on Thursday.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun urged the Taliban to "send our people home quickly and safely." He said 23 South Koreans had been abducted.

Roh also spoke with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and asked for cooperation to quickly win the release of the South Koreans, Roh's office said.

A senior Korean official said the South Korean government was "maintaining contact" with the Taliban.

The South Koreans were kidnapped at gunpoint from a bus in Ghazni province's Qarabagh district on Thursday as they travelled on the main highway from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar. It was the largest-scale abduction of foreigners since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.