Militants threatening to behead a South Korean hostage in Iraq unless Seoul pulls troops out of the country have agreed to give more time for talks on his fate, an Iraqi mediator told reporters yesterday.
Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been accused by Washington of links to al-Qaeda, initially set a Monday night deadline when Kim Sun-il was shown pleading for his life in a video tape on al Jazeera.
But Mohammed al-Obeidi, an Iraqi working for South Korean security firm NKTS in Baghdad, said Iraqi clerics who were in talks with the captors of the 33-year-old had told him the deadline for talks had been extended. Seoul has rejected the demand to pull troops out and scrap plans to send more.
"The kidnappers have said they are willing to negotiate as long as the Korean government stops making provocative remarks and softens its tone on troop deployment," Obeidi said.
South Korea said yesterday it did not know for certain Kim was alive.
The US-led occupation authority vowed to do all it could to rescue 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 Army.
He was seized on June 17 in Fallujah, a flashpoint city in the anti-US insurgency 50km west of Baghdad.
In the northern city of Mosul, a university dean and her husband were found murdered yesterday in the latest in a series of killings of high-profile figures in Iraq.
US and Iraqi officials say insurgents are stepping up a campaign of assassinations, bomb attacks and economic sabotage to try to disrupt the formal handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government on June 30.
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North Korea tested nuclear-capable rocket launchers, state media reported yesterday, a day after Seoul detected the launch of about 10 ballistic missiles. The test comes after South Korean and US forces launched their springtime military drills, due to run until Thursday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Saturday oversaw the testing of the multiple rocket launcher system (MRLS), the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. The test involved 12 600mm-caliber ultra-precision multiple rocket launchers and two artillery companies, it said. Kim said the drill gave Pyongyang’s enemies, within the 420km striking range, a sense of “uneasiness” and “a deep understanding
North Korea yesterday fired about 10 ballistic missiles to the sea toward Japan, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, days after Pyongyang warned of “terrible consequences” over ongoing South Korea-US military drills. Pyongyang recently dashed hopes of a diplomatic thaw with Seoul, Washington’s security ally, describing its latest peace efforts as a “clumsy, deceptive farce.” Seoul’s military detected “around 10 ballistic missiles launched from the Sunan area in North Korea toward the East Sea [Sea of Japan] at around 1:20pm,” JCS said in a statement, referring to South Korea’s name for the body of water. The missiles
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