Militants decapitate South Korean hostage in Iraq

8.00am - By ANDREW MARSHALL

BAGHDAD - Militants beheaded a South Korean hostage in Iraq Tuesday after Seoul refused their demand to withdraw its troops and scrap plans to send more.

South Korea said US soldiers had found the body of 33-year-old Kim Sun-il, five days after he was seized in Falluja, a guerrilla hotbed 50km west of Baghdad.

Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera broadcast footage of four heavily armed men standing over a kneeling Kim, who was dressed in an orange tunic and with an orange blindfold -- mimicking the orange jumpsuits worn by prisoners in US detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

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

The tape went on to show one of the men cutting off Kim's head with a knife, said a spokesman for the television network.

Monday, a group led by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said it was holding Kim and would execute him unless Seoul pulled out its 670 military medics and engineers in Iraq and cancelled plans to deploy 3000 more troops.

South Korea said after Kim's killing that it stood firm on its troop decision. "Our government's basic spirit and position has not changed," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman.

US officials say Zarqawi's group also beheaded US hostage Nicholas Berg in Iraq last month -- and that Zarqawi himself probably wielded the knife in Berg's killing.

President Bush, speaking after Kim's death, said "the free world cannot be intimidated by the brutal action of these barbaric people."

"They want us to leave. They want us to cower in the face of their brutal killings, and the United States will not be intimidated by these people," he added.

In footage of Berg's decapitation, he was shown wearing an orange tunic. The captors of Paul Johnson, a US contractor beheaded in Saudi Arabia last week by militants linked to al Qaeda, also dressed him in orange before they killed him.

Since early April, dozens of foreign hostages have been seized in Iraq, many around Falluja. Most have been freed but at least four have been killed.
Kim, an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian, had worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a South Korean firm supplying goods to the US army.

All South Koreans working for firms in Iraq were likely to leave the country by early next month, said a Seoul commerce ministry spokeswoman.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq