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Sarge
06-21-2004, 01:04 PM
http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=World&cat=Iraq



Militants Threaten to Kill Korean Hostage in Iraq

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By Alistair Lyon

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Muslim militants in Iraq (news - web sites) 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.


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Slideshow: Iraq





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Special Coverage





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 U.S. 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.


The threat to kill Kim came a day after a U.S. air strike on Falluja on what the U.S. military said was a house used by Zarqawi's followers in the volatile town west of Baghdad.


Local Iraqi officers said women and children but no foreign Muslim militants were among the 22 people killed in the attack. But Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq, told a news conference "key personnel in the Zarqawi network" were killed.


The raid shattered a lull in Falluja and fueled tensions before the formal end of Iraq's U.S.-led occupation on June 30.


OIL EXPORTS RESUME


In Ramadi, another flashpoint city west of Falluja, four U.S. soldiers were killed by insurgents, witnesses said. Their bodies lay sprawled on the ground. The U.S. military confirmed that four servicemen were killed but gave no further details.


North of Baghdad, a roadside bomb and gun attack on a convoy near Mosul killed five Iraqis and wounded four, the U.S. army said. Witnesses said the victims worked for a security company.


Insurgents, thought to include Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) loyalists, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sought to disrupt the handover to Iraq's new interim government with bombings, killings and attacks on the oil industry, its economic bedrock.


Sabotage last week halted all oil exports, but officials said they resumed on Monday after repairs to one of two pipelines blown up in southern Iraq. The sabotage had choked off about 1.6 million barrels of daily exports from Gulf terminals.


Postwar violence has shattered Washington's hopes that last year's invasion to topple Saddam would lead swiftly to stability, peace and reconstruction.


HEARTS AND MINDS DISASTER


Nine-tenths of Iraqis now view U.S.-led troops as occupiers, not liberators, according to an opinion poll taken for the occupation authority in late April, just as a scandal over abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American troops was breaking.





Three soldiers charged with abuses at Abu Ghraib jail faced initial hearings in Baghdad on Monday, reviving images of sexual and physical humiliation that sparked worldwide outrage.

The photographs of smirking American soldiers tormenting naked detainees have rocked the U.S. military and prompted critics to argue that policies adopted in President Bush (news - web sites)'s "war on terror" encouraged the cruelty.

The hearing aims to tie up any outstanding legal issues before the courts martial of Specialist Charles Graner, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick and Sergeant Javal Davis.

Judge Colonel James Pohl agreed to a request by the defense to interview Central Command chief John Abizaid and top Iraq commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. One of the defense lawyers said he would seek to put Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the witness stand.

Judge Pohl also agreed to a defense request that Abu Ghraib prison should not be demolished as it was a "crime scene." Bush has said the prison will be torn down.

South Korea (news - web sites) said after an emergency meeting of President Roh Moo-hyun's National Security Council that it will go ahead with its plan to send 3,000 troops to northern Iraq. (Additional reporting by Michael Georgy and Matthew Green in Baghdad, Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul and Martin Nesirky and Lim Jong-nam in Seoul)