IRAQ: Islamic militants in Iraq threatened to behead a South Korean hostage last night unless his country scrapped plans to send 3,000 more troops - a demand rejected by Seoul.
Meanwhile, in Ramadi, west of Falluja, four US soldiers were killed by guerrillas.
US-led occupation authorities vowed to do all they could to rescue 33-year-old businessman Mr Kim Sun-il, shown pleading for his life in a video tape aired on Arabic al-Jazeera television on Sunday night.
A banner in the background named his captors as Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, a group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, accused by Washington of having links to al-Qaeda.
"Please get out of here," Mr Kim begged, referring to South Korean troops already in Iraq. "I don't want to die."
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 on June 17th, 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 Mr Kim said in the video tape.
The group said Seoul had 24 hours to comply.
But South Korea said after an emergency meeting of President Roh Moo-hyun's National Security Council that it would go ahead with its plan to send 3,000 troops to northern Iraq.
In Ramadi, west of Falluja, four US soldiers were killed by guerrillas, witnesses said. The US military confirmed the killings 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 US army said.
Witnesses said the Iraqis worked for a security company.
Guerrillas, thought to include Saddam Hussein loyalists, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sought to upset a handover to an interim Iraqi government with bombings, killings and attacks on the oil industry.
Sabotage last week halted all oil exports, but officials said they resumed yesterday 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 Gulf terminals.