New Delhi/Dubai: Concerns mounted tonight (July 29, 2004) over the fate of three Indian hostages held in Iraq with captors threatening to execute one of the seven captives if their demands were not met by tomorrow.

As the news of the latest threat came after the killing of two Pakistani hostages by another militant group in Iraq, the Crisis Management Group, set up by the Government to deal with the hostage drama, went into a huddle to discuss the issue.

Taken aback by the development, the Kuwaiti company Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company for which Antrayami, Tilak Raj and Sukh Dev Singh, all truck drivers, were working appealed to the captors to continue negotiations and not to execute their threat.

The little known outfit 'Black Banners', which took the three Indians along with three Kenyans and an Egyptian as hostage on July 27, in a video shown tonight on Al Arabiya television said they would kill one of them at 7 PM (21:30 IST) tomorrow if their demands were not met immediately.

It did not say which hostage would be killed first. The videotape showed a masked man pointing an M-16 automatic rifle at the head of an Indian hostage who was wearing an orange dress similar to the ones worn by previous foreign hostages that were killed.

The gunman in the video said no one had contacted the group.

As the television channels flashed the latest threat, fear gripped the relatives of Tilakraj and Antaryami in Una in Himachal Pradesh.

The group, which had initially demanded that the Kuwaiti company pull out of Iraq, later also asked it to pay compensation to the families of Iraqis killed in Falluja and release of Iraqi prisoners in Kuwait and the US.

An AFP report from Baghdad quoting mediator Sheikh Hisham Al-Dulaimi said the Indian embassy in Iraq is trying through a go-between to broker the release of the hostages.

A militant group calling itself Islamic Army in Iraq, holding two Pakistani contractors hostage, said late last night that it had killed the men, but freed their Iraqi driver, according to the Pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera.

They were identified by Pakistan as engineer Raja Azad, 49, and driver Sajad Naeem, 29, both of whom worked for the Kuwait-based al-Tamimi group in Baghdad.

With the killing of the two Pakistanis by their captors in Iraq, India advised its nationals to defer their visits to Iraq for the time being in view of the "seriousness" of the current security situation in that country.

"In view of the seriousness of the current security situation in Iraq, Government of India advises its citizens to defer visits to that country for the time being," it was officially stated in New Delhi.

Before embarking on his visit to Bangkok for the BIMST-EC Summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said all out efforts were on to secure the safe release of the three Indians abducted in Iraq.

"All out efforts are on and I am hopeful that they will succeed," he told reporters when asked what efforts were being made to free the hostages in the trouble-torn West Asian country.