Earlier, Ramankutty Maniyappan, a 36-year old BRO employee, was abducted on November 19, 2005, and his decapitated body was found on a road between Zaranj, capital of Nimroz, and an area called Ghor Ghori, four days later. Following his abduction, Taliban spokesperson Qari Yusuf Ahmadi had claimed that they had given the BRO an ultimatum to leave Afghanistan within 48 hours, failing which they would behead Maniyappan. Nimroz is the location, among others, of the strategic Zarang-Delaram Highway Project under execution by India.
There are approximately 3,000-4,000 Indian nationals working on several reconstruction projects across Afghanistan. The present level of India’s assistance to Afghanistan is USD 750 million, making it the 5th largest bilateral donor after the US, UK, Japan and Germany. According to the Indian Embassy at Kabul, of the total pledge of USD 750 million between 2002 and 2009, the fully committed amount is USD 758.21 million and cumulative disbursement up to 2006-07 has been US $ 278.94 million. This is higher than the disbursement rates of most other countries. The budgetary estimate for 2007-08 is US $ 105.04 million.
The augmenting violence in 2008 compounds distressing trends that had been established in the preceding year. Violence claimed at least 8,000 lives in 2007, the highest death toll for any year since 2001. Armed conflicts between the Taliban, on the one hand, and Afghan and international forces, on the other, left over 1,500 civilians dead in 2007, according to a UN report. Insurgency-related violence "reached unprecedented levels in 2007 with an average of 566 incidents recorded per month, and 160 ‘actual suicide attacks’ throughout the year", according to the report. Writing in the March 2008 Report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated, further,