SEOUL, June 21: South Korea stood firm on Monday on its pledge to deploy thousands of troops to Iraq as a militant group threatened to behead a terrified Korean hostage unless the plan is scrapped.

The militants said on Sunday they would behead 33-year-old Kim Sun-Il within 24 hours unless plans to dispatch thousands of South Korean troops to Iraq were abandoned. The threat was delivered in a video tape screened on Al Jazeera television and repeated several times on South Korean TV networks.

A terrified Kim was seen pleading for his life and begging the South Korean government to reverse its troop dispatch plan. "Korean soldiers, get out of here. I don't want to die. I don't want to die," Kim said in English on the video footage seen here.

One of the hostage-takers was shown delivering the ultimatum in Arabic. "Do not send any more troops to Iraq or we will send you the head of this Korean and it will be followed, God willing, by the heads of your soldiers," said the man, flanked by two other hostage takers, all wearing scarves to hide their faces.

"We give you 24 hours starting from Sunday June 20, 2004" to agree to the demand, he said. It was unclear when the deadline would expire, officials said here. The militants said they belonged to the Tawhid wa al Jihad (Unification and Holy War), a group led by Al Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, whom Washington blames for a long list of attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The footage was released two days after an American hostage was beheaded by Al Qaeda extremists in Saudi Arabia when a 72-hour deadline ran out for the release of hundreds of militants detained in the country.

Mr Kim was abducted on Thursday near Fallujah along with several other people, according to Kim Choon-Ho, president of the South Korean company for which Kim works as a translator. Those abducted with him included employees of US company KBR, a part of the Halliburton group. -AFP

Doctors' refusal

South Korean doctors posted in southern Iraq refused on Monday to treat Iraqi patients to protest the threat to kill the hostage. They are "refusing to receive Iraqi patients to show their displeasure with the kidnapping and have decided to await his fate before deciding whether to continue providing care", their interpreter said. -AFP