Kim Sun-il
| Kim Sun-il | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 13, 1970 South Korea |
| Died | June 22, 2004 (aged 33) Iraq |
| Cause of death | Decapitation |
| Body discovered | June 23, 2004 |
| Nationality | South Korean |
| Occupation | Translator |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 김선일 |
| Hanja | 金鮮一 |
| Revised Romanization | Gim Seon(-)il |
| McCune–Reischauer | Kim Sŏnil |
Kim Sun-il (September 13, 1970 – c. June 22, 2004) was a South Korean interpreter and Christian missionary who was kidnapped and murdered in Iraq.
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.
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 (31 mi) 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. (This would put South Korea behind only the United Kingdom in number of non-U.S. coalition troops in Iraq.)
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".
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