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.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
RSS