Iraqi militants threatened this morning to behead a South Korean hostage within 24 hours if Seoul does not cancel plans to deploy 3,000 troops to northern Iraq, according to videotape on Arabic television station Al Jazeera.
Footage showed Korean businessman Kim Sun-il (33) pleading for his life, and a banner in the background named the group as Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, the name of the militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda operative in Iraq.
"Please get out of here . . . I don't want to die," the Korean is shown pleading on Al Jazeera.
The threat to kill the hostage came less than 24 hours after a US air strike on the town of Falluja on what the US military said was a safe house used by militants led by Zarqawi.
Iraqi officers said women and children but no foreign Muslim militants were among the 22 people killed in the attack.
The raid shattered a lull in Falluja and fueled tensions before the formal end of Iraq's US-led occupation on June 30th.
Insurgents, believed to include loyalists of Saddam Hussein, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sown havoc ahead of the handover to a new interim Iraqi government and targeted Iraq's oil industry, lifeline to the country's reconstruction.
Iraqi officials said yesterday engineers had finished repairing one of two sabotaged oil pipelines in southern Iraq and officials expect partial exports to resume today.