Kim Sun-il was a South Korean interpreter and Christian missionary who
was kidnapped and murdered in Iraq. Early life and education
Kim was fluent in Arabic, holding a graduate degree in that language from
Seoul's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in February 2003. He also had
degrees in English and theology, and had hoped to become a missionary in the
Middle East. Kidnapping
Kim arrived in Iraq on June 15, 2003, working for Gana General Trading
Company, a South Korean company under contract to the American military. On
May 30, 2004, he was kidnapped in Fallujah — about 50 km west of Baghdad —
by the Islamist group Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and held as a hostage. The
group, which was allegedly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed him on or about
June 22 when South Korea refused to meet their demands that it cancel its plans
to send 3,000 more troops to Iraq and withdraw the 660 military medics and
engineers already there. Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'l Jihad had
initially set a June 21 deadline in a videotape showing Kim pleading for his
life. However, on June 22, after initial reports that the militants had given
their hostage more time, Al Jazeera television reported that they had
received a videotape footage of Kim being decapitated by five men, like
hostages Nick Berg and Eugene Armstrong in Iraq, Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia,
and Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The report was subsequently confirmed by the South
Korean government. In the murder video, Kim is fitted with an orange jumpsuit
and blindfolded, one of the captors reads a statement and then another
captor takes out a knife and decapitates him. The statement said: "Korean
citizens, you were warned, your hands were the ones who killed him. Enough
lies, enough cheatings. Your soldiers are here not for the sake of Iraqis, but
for cursed America". The president of Gana General Trading is
said to have known about the kidnapping almost immediately, but he did not
report it until after the videotape aired. He had consulted a lawyer, who
argued that the situation must be managed without government intervention
if Kim was to be saved. It is claimed that government officials had little
time to react. However, there are also reports that a videotape of Kim in
captivity, in which he appears calm and openly criticizes U.S. intervention in
Iraq, was delivered to the Associated Press Television News offices in Baghdad
at the beginning of June, and that on June 3, an AP reporter in Seoul
contacted the South Korean foreign ministry asking if they knew of a
missing person with a name similar to Kim Sun-il.
Reaction South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's
National Security Council issued a statement condemning the killing. South
Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication has banned the Kim Sun-il
murder video and is trying to prevent it from being spread. The unedited video
was available on the website Ogrish.com during the summer of 2004. The website
received DDoS attacks as a result of hosting the footage.
U.S. President George W. Bush condemned the killers, saying: "The free world
cannot be intimidated by the brutal actions of these barbaric people."
Reports and editorials in South Korea's press reflected despair at the death of
the hostage Kim Sun-il in Iraq, but also defiance towards the kidnappers. South
Korean TV stations interrupted their schedules when Mr Kim's body was
discovered and subsequently broadcast special rolling news programmes. "Kim
Sun-il killed - body identified" was the headline in the independent daily Donga
Ilbo. "Kim Sun-il ends up dead" was how the popular daily JoongAng Ilbo reported
it. In South Korea, thousands of people rallied against the South Korean
military going to Iraq, and to express anger about Kim's death, they burned
portraits of the mastermind of his killing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The South
Korean government eventually passed a law barring passport issuance for 1–3
years to South Koreans who "damage national prestige"; the law was
interpreted as an attempt to curtail Christian missionaries, especially after
the 2007 South Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan.
See also 2007 South Korean hostage crisis in
Afghanistan References