KANDAHAR, Sept 2: The bodies of two people found shot dead in southern Afghanistan are likely to be those of Japanese tourists who vanished last month, a provincial governor said on Friday.

The Japanese teachers — named by their school as technical arts teacher Jun Fukusho, 44, and female English teacher Shinobu Hasegawa, 30 — were reported missing after they failed to return from a holiday in the region last month.

“There is a strong possibility — I strongly believe they’re those two Japanese who went missing a month ago,” Kandahar provincial governor Asadullah Khalid told reporters at a press conference in the city.

The pair were wearing foreign clothes, he said.

Mr Khalid said their remains had been sent to Kabul for a post-mortem examination which would determine their identities.

The two wooden coffins arrived in the Afghan capital late on Friday and were carried into the Ministry of Public Health, a reporter at the scene said, although officials there refused to comment.

Mr Khalid said the pair had been shot and their bodies dumped near the Spin Boldak highway, which links the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar with Chaman, where the couple had crossed into Afghanistan on Aug 8.

A Japanese diplomat in Kabul said that there had been no official confirmation that the bodies were those of the missing pair.

Media reports in Tokyo have said that they apparently set out on their own in a taxi to see the remains of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a set of huge 1,500-year-old structures dynamited by the hardline Taliban regime in 2001.

“The bodies were found with the help of local people in Nawda, some 40 kilometers from Kandahar. They were shot,” Mr Khalid said.

The dead man and woman appear to have been killed a week ago, governor Khalid added.—AFP