Rebels behead S Korean as Seoul doesn’t give in

TV channel Al Jazeera broadcast footage of four heavily armed men standing over a kneeling Kim, who was dressed in an orange tunic and with an orange blindfold — mimicking the orange jumpsuits worn by prisoners in American detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

On Monday, a group led by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi said it was holding Kim and would execute him unless Seoul pulled out its 670 military medics and engineers in Iraq and cancelled plans to deploy 3,000 more troops.

Senior US officials say Zarqawi’s group also beheaded American hostage Nicholas Berg in Iraq last month — and that Zarqawi himself probably wielded the knife in Berg’s killing.

In footage of Berg’s decapitation, he was shown wearing an orange tunic.

The captors of Paul Johnson, a US contractor beheaded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last week by militants linked to Al Qaeda, also dressed him in orange before they killed him.

Since early April, dozens of foreign hostages have been seized in Iraq, many around Falluja. Most have been freed but at least four have been killed by their captors.

Kim, an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian, had worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a South Korean firm supplying goods to the American Army.

A Seoul Commerce Ministry spokeswoman said all South Koreans working for firms in Iraq were likely to leave the country by early next month.

Meanwhile in Mosul, a university dean and her husband were found murdered on Tuesday in the latest in a series of killings of high-profile figures. In Baghdad, a car bomb blast killed two Iraqis.

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 about 1.6 million barrels of daily exports from the Persian Gulf’s oil terminals.

In Baghdad, a pretrial hearing for one of the seven US soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison rejected a request by the defence to reconsider the charges. Staff Sergeant Ivan ‘‘Chip’’ Frederick is expected to face a court martial later this year. —(Reuters)