Muslim militants in Iraq threatened to behead a South Korean hostage by Monday night unless his country scrapped plans to send 3,000 more troops - a demand rejected by Seoul.
A videotape aired on Arabic Al Jazeera television on Sunday night showed 33-year-old Korean businessman Kim Sun-il pleading for his life. A banner in the background named his captors as Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of links to al Qaeda.
"Please get out of here," Kim begged, 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 in Falluja on June 17, the day before Seoul announced its troop plan.
"We ask you to withdraw your forces from our land and not to send any more troops, and if not we'll send you this Korean's head," one of a group of armed, masked men standing around the terrified South Korean said in the videotape.
The group said Seoul had 24 hours to comply.
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