Kim Sun-il

Kim Sun-il (김선일, September 13, 1970 - June 22, 2004) was a South Korean translator working in Iraq for Gana General Trading Company, a South Korean company under contract to the U.S. military.

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 Christian missionary in the Middle East. He arrived in Iraq on June 15, 2003.

On May 31, 2004, Kim was abducted in Fallujah—about 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad—by the Islamic militant group Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'l Jihad (in English, "Monotheism and Holy Struggle"), and held as a hostage. The group, which is led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, murdered him on or about June 22 when South Korea refused to meet the terrorists' 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 just behind 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 showing more footage of Kim, with a message that he had been decapitated, like hostages Nick Berg in Iraq, Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia, and Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The report was subsequently confirmed by the South Korean government.