The families of 21 South Koreans held by Afghanistan's Taliban for more than two weeks on Saturday visited an Islamic mosque in Seoul to appeal to Muslims to help free the hostages. The family group, some of whom are Christians, delivered a letter to the mosque appealing for assistance from the Afghan people.
"These children went to act on their love beyond race, religion and borders," the group said in the message. It said that the aid group, sent by a Presbyterian church, had gone to Afghanistan "not just out of religious zeal" but to pay the debt Koreans owed to the world for their economic growth since the 1950-1953 war.
"We still believe Korea is still Afghanistan's friend. Please send our twenty-one children home that we may hug them once again," the letter said.
At a hospital on the outskirts of Seoul Saturday the funeral was held of Shim Sung-Min, 29, a second of the hostages killed by the Islamic militants in Afghanistan.
Shim's tearful father addressed his lost son, saying: "It rains as if heaven knows your parents' mind. Pray for the safety of the 21 hostages from heaven."
The Taliban seized 23 volunteers, including 16 women, on a Kabul-Kandahar highway in Ghazni, Afghanistan, on July 19.
The remaining 21 captives are said to be ill - two of them in a serious condition. The Taliban refused Friday to allow an Afghan medical team access to the ailing captives. The captors have demanded that Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan and US custody be released in order to free the hostages, but the prisoner-for-hostage swap has been rejected by the US and Afghan government.
Some South Koreans believe the United States has the key to free the Taliban prisoners, but Washington has maintained its decades-old policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
The Seoul government called for "flexibility" in the negotiations while seeking direct talks with the Taliban captors, but it admitted to having little influence over the fate of the hostages.