Militants threaten to behead Korean hostage

MUSLIM militants in Iraq threatened to behead a South Korean hostage by last night unless his country scrapped plans to send 3,000 more troops — a demand rejected by Seoul.

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.

“We ask you to withdraw your forces from our land and not to send any more troops, and if not we’ll send you this Korean’s head,” one of a group of armed, masked men standing around the terrified South Korean said in the videotape. The group said Seoul had 24 hours to comply.

The threat to kill Mr Kim came a day after a US air strike in Fallujah on what the US military said was a house used by Zarqawi’s followers in the volatile town west of Baghdad.

Local Iraqi officers said women and children but no foreign Muslim militants were among the 22 people killed in the attack. But Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq, said “key personnel in the Zarqawi network” were killed.

The raid shattered a lull in Fallujah and fuelled tensions before the formal end of Iraq’s US-led occupation on June 30. In Ramadi, another flashpoint city west of Fallujah, four US soldiers were killed by insurgents, witnesses said. Their bodies lay sprawled on the ground. The US military confirmed four servicemen were killed but gave no further details.

North of Baghdad, a roadside bomb and gun attack on a convoy near Mosul killed five Iraqis and wounded four, the US army said. Witnesses said the victims worked for a security company.

Insurgents, thought to include Saddam Hussein loyalists, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sought to disrupt the handover to Iraq’s new interim government with bombings, killings and attacks on the oil industry.

Post-war violence has shattered Washington’s hopes that last year’s invasion would lead swiftly to stability, peace and reconstruction. Nine-tenths of Iraqis now view US-led troops as occupiers, not liberators, according to an opinion poll.