Kidnapping
Kim arrived in Iraq on June 15, 2003, working for Gana General Trading Company, a South Korean company under contract to the United States 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, he is sitted on 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 dealt with 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 sounding like Kim Sun-il's.
Read more about this topic: Kim Sun-il