No news on fate of Korean under Iraq death threat

11.45pm

BAGHDAD - Islamic militants in Iraq threatened to behead a South Korean hostage unless his country scrapped plans to deploy more troops -- a demand rejected by Seoul -- but a deadline passed without any news of his fate.

Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been accused by Washington of links to al Qaeda, set a Monday night deadline when 33-year-old Kim Sun-il was shown pleading for his life in a video tape on Al Jazeera.

By early on Tuesday, there was no information from any authoritative source on Kim's fate.

South Korea said after an emergency meeting of President Roh Moo-hyun's National Security Council that it would go ahead with its plan to send 3000 troops to northern Iraq, and US-led occupation authorities vowed to do all they could to rescue Kim.

"Please get out of here," Kim begged in the video, 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 on June 17 in Falluja, west of Baghdad.

In Ramadi, west of Falluja, four US soldiers were killed by guerrillas, but details of their deaths were sketchy.

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 Iraqis worked for a security company.

Guerrillas, thought to include Saddam Hussein loyalists, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sought to upset a handover to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June with bombings, killings and attacks on the oil industry, Iraq's economic bedrock.

Sabotage last week halted all oil exports, but officials said they resumed on Monday after repairs to one of two pipelines blown up in southern Iraq. The sabotage had choked about 1.6 million barrels of daily exports from Gulf terminals.

Nine out of 10 Iraqis viewed US-led forces as occupiers, not liberators, according to an opinion poll conducted for the occupation authorities in April, just as a scandal over abuses of Iraqi prisoners by US troops was breaking.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq