An Iraqi group has carried out its threat to behead a South Korean hostage, the South Korean government has confirmed.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Shin Bong-kil told reporters the US military had found 33-year-old Kim Sun-il's body and had informed South Korean officials.
The Arabic Tv station al-Jazeera broadcast a brief extract of film showing a group of heavily armed gunmen, standing over a kneeling, blindfolded figure dressed in orange, saying they were about to carry out their threat.
"We warned you and you ignored (the warning)...Enough lies. Your army is not here for the sake of Iraqis but for the sake of cursed America," one of the men said.
Militants kidnapped 33-year-old Kim Sun-il on June 17 and had threatened on Monday to kill him within 24 hours unless South Korea withdrew its troops from Iraq .
Earlier today, an Iraqi intermediary said the group, Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, had agreed to allow more time for talks on his fate.
The US-led occupation authority in Iraq had vowed to do all it could to rescue Kim, an Arabic speaker and evangelical Christian who had worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a Korean firm supplying goods to the US army.
He was seized in Falluja, a flashpoint city in the anti-US insurgency 50 km west of Baghdad.
Mr Kim was shown pleading for his life in an earlier video sent to Arabic satellite channels on Sunday night. In the same tape his captors said he would be killed within 24 hours.
The South Korean embassy in Baghdad confirmed that the body found today was Kim by studying a picture of the remains it received by e-mail, Shin said. "It breaks our heart that we have to announce this unfortunate news," he said.