Death threat for PM as Korea mourns hostage

BAGHDAD - Islamist militants threatened yesterday to assassinate Iraq's interim Prime Minister, just hours after they claimed the beheading of a South Korean hostage in the violent run-up to a United States handover to Iraqi rule.

"As for you, Allawi - sorry, the democratically elected Prime Minister - we have found for you a useful poison and a sure sword," said a taped voice, supposedly that of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on an Islamist website.

"We will pursue our mission to the end," said the voice, referring to plans to kill Iyad Allawi.

Allawi's Government, selected by a United Nations envoy in consultation with US and Iraqi officials, will be sworn in when the US-led occupation formally ends in a week's time.

It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the taped voice, posted a day after US forces found the decapitated body of Kim Sun-il and launched an airstrike on a suspected safe house of al-Zarqawi's group in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun denounced the beheading and said his country would still send more troops to Iraq rather than bow to terrorism.

Kim, a 33-year-old Arabic-speaking translator, had been kidnapped in Fallujah on June 17.

His captors, who had earlier released a videotape in which he pleaded for his life, killed him after Seoul rejected their demands to pull 670 South Korean medics and engineers out of Iraq and drop plans to send 3000 troops.

Arabic television channel Al Jazeera showed video footage on Tuesday of hooded gunmen standing over a kneeling Kim, who was blindfolded and wearing an orange tunic similar to those worn by prisoners in US detention facilities such as Guantanamo Bay.

"We warned you and you ignored it," one of the men said. "Enough lies. Your Army is not here for the sake of Iraqis but for the sake of cursed America."

Al Jazeera said the tape went on to show one of the five men cutting off Kim's head with a knife, which it did not broadcast. The US airstrike, its second in four days against suspected safe houses for Zarqawi's network in Fallujah, destroyed a garage and killed four people, residents said.

Anti-US insurgents have intensified a campaign of bombings, assassinations and attacks on oil targets to disrupt the June 30 handover.

A roadside bomb exploded near a Baghdad hospital yesterday, killing a woman and small boy and wounding the woman's husband.

Kim's parents had urged their Government to do everything to save their son, an evangelical Christian who had worked in Iraq for a year for a South Korean firm supplying the US Army.

After news of his death, Kim's parents sat cross-legged and stunned in their modest backstreet house in the city of Pusan, as his sister wailed and thrashed around in grief.

A sombre President Roh condemned the killing but said South Korea would send troops rather than bow to terrorism.

"I still feel heartbroken to remember that the deceased was desperately pleading for his life," Roh said, referring to the video showing Kim crying: "I don't want to die."

Kim's desperate cries struck a chord with many South Koreans, angered by the brutal killing.

"The Government should have dropped the troops plan if it really cared about its own people, rather than its relationship with the US," said Yoon Hyun-sung, 31.

Kim's killing echoed the beheadings of a US hostage in Iraq last month and a US hostage in Saudi Arabia last week. All three were dressed in orange before being killed by militants said to have links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group.

Since early April, dozens of foreigners have been seized in Iraq. Many have been freed, but at least four have been killed.

"The free world cannot be intimidated by the brutal action of these barbaric people," US President George W. Bush said after Kim's killing.

Elsewhere in Iraq, two US soldiers were killed and one wounded in the town of Balad, north of Baghdad, the US military said.

The deaths brought to 623 the US combat death toll in Iraq since the start of last year's war.

Figures compiled from media reports by human rights group Iraq Body Count show that 9000 to 11,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war launched to destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

None has been found.

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