South Koreans reacted with shock and anger yesterday to the beheading of a hostage in Iraq by militants who killed him after Seoul refused their demand to withdraw its troops and scrap plans to send more.
US soldiers found the decapitated body of Kim Sun-il on Tuesday, five days after he was seized in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by a group led by militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
PHOTO: AP
The group killed 33-year-old Kim, who had been shown in a video pleading for his life, after Seoul stood firm on keeping 670 South Korean medics and engineers in Iraq and on plans to send 3,000 troops to join US-led forces there.
A sombre President Roh Moo-hyun 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 a terrified Kim crying: "I don't want to die."
Kim's parents had urged their government to do everything to save their son, an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian, who worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a South Korean firm supplying goods to the US army.
After news of his death, they sat cross-legged and stunned in their modest backstreet house in the South Korean city of Pusan, as relatives and neighbors sought to console his sister, who was wailing and thrashing around in grief.
Roh has argued the troop decision was a tough but crucial step to support its US ally and that the forces were intended to help rebuild the country.
Since early April, dozens of foreign hostages have been seized in Iraq.
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