South Korea not to change its plans in the face of its citizen's death

South Korean authorities said they would not halt the sending 3.000 of their troops to Iraq. South Korean citizen, 33-year-old translator Kim Sun-il was taken as a hostage and sentenced to death by Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of links to al-Qa'ida. This group is also responsible for the beheading of an American engineer, last month.

Mr 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 Fallujah on 17 June, 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 broadcast on Sunday night. The group said Seoul had 24 hours to comply, quotes independent.co.uk.

The family of a kidnapped South Korean threatened with beheading by his captors in Iraq last night pleaded with the Seoul government to rethink its plan to send 3,000 troops to Baghdad as a deadline set by militants passed.