South Korean Christian Beheaded in Iraq

(ANS) – A South Korean translator working for a company that supplies equipment to US liberation forces in Iraq has been executed after a deadline set by his captors passed. Al jazeera television network reported that in a videotape it received, the resistance group Jamat al-Tawhid and Jihad said it was fulfilling a pledge it made that the 33-old-year South Korean translator Kim Sun-Il would be beheaded if the group’s demands were not met by the South Korean government. The captors threatened on Sunday to kill Kim (who was captured last Thursday near Fallujah), in 24 hours if South Korea did not cancel its plan to deploy 3,000 additional troops to Iraq . South Korea rejected the demand, Al Jazeera reported, and on Monday said it would send forces to Iraq despite an earlier video showing Kim begging for his life. Kim, an evangelical Christian and Arabic speaker had worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a South Korean firm supplying goods to the U.S. military. CNN reported that a senior coalition official in Iraq said the body, which was found by U.S. military police west of Baghdad , appeared to have been thrown from a vehicle. “The man had been beheaded, and the head was recovered with the body,” the official said. CNN reported that Pentagon sources said the body had been booby-trapped with explosives.