BAGHDAD — Carrying out a threat issued two days earlier, Iraqi militants beheaded a South Korean hostage Tuesday, dumping the man's body on the side of the road between Baghdad and Fallouja where it was found by U.S. soldiers.
On Tuesday night, U.S. fighter jets launched strikes in Fallouja on what the military said was a safe house sheltering associates of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant whose network was believed to be responsible for the kidnapping. At least three people were killed in the U.S. strike, hospital officials said.
South Koreans, who had pleaded with militants to spare the life of 33-year-old interpreter Kim Sun Il, shed collective tears upon learning of Kim's beheading.
For two days, the hostage drama played out to its tragic conclusion on Korean television. In footage that was aired constantly, a terrified Kim screamed for his life. Live coverage from inside his family's spartan home showed his distraught parents begging captors to spare him.
"My heart breaks and my breathing stops when I think of Kim's cries," South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun said in a televised address this morning, in which he bowed to offer his condolences to the nation and the family.
"I'm in total shock. I couldn't sleep a wink. I can't work," said Lee Hee Kun, a literary agent in her 40s, one of many Koreans transfixed by the hostage crisis. "I can only hope that Koreans as a nation will not take this news irrationally."
Security was tightened around all Islamic facilities in South Korea after police reported that numerous threatening calls were made to the main mosque in Seoul.
Kim was the third foreign hostage in the Middle East to be beheaded in a little over a month. His body was recovered on another day of rampant violence in Iraq, less than 10 days before the U.S. is to hand over sovereignty to a caretaker Iraqi government.
In one incident, insurgents killed a prominent Iraqi academic and her husband. In another, a bodyguard and a 3-year-old girl died in what appeared to be a failed assassination attempt on an Iraqi Cabinet member.
Kim was kidnapped last week by a group calling itself "One God Holy War." The group released a video, threatening to kill Kim by sundown Monday unless South Korea agreed to withdraw its 670 noncombat troops from Iraq and cancel plans to send 3,000 troops by August.
The South Korean government said that it would not give in to the demands.
