Militants threaten to behead Korean hostage
A videotape aired on Arabic Al Jazeera television on Sunday night showed 33-year-old Korean businessman Kim Sun-il pleading for his life. A banner in the background named his captors as Jama’at al-Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of links to al-Qaida. “Please get out of here,” Mr Kim begged, referring to South Korean troops already in Iraq. “I don’t want to die.”
Kim, an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian who has worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a Korean firm supplying goods to the US military, was seized in Fallujah on June 17, the day before Seoul announced its troop plan.
