Taliban say 22 SKorea hostages still alive

KANDAHAR (AFP) - The Taliban said 22 South Korean hostages they were holding in Afghanistan were still alive Thursday despite an overnight deadline to start killing them.

Hours after killing one hostage on Wednesday, the Islamic militants had set what they called a "final" deadline for a prisoner swap, but a spokesman said no others had been slain.

"Since the last deadline no more Koreans have been killed," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP in a telephone call from an unknown location. "They are all alive so far."

It was the first word on the fate of the remaining Christian aid workers since the 1:00 am (2030 GMT Wednesday) deadline, which was fixed after the bullet-riddled corpse of one hostage was found.

South Korea identified the dead man as 42-year-old Bae Hyung-Kyu, a Presbyterian pastor and the leader of the aid mission, which was reportedly in the country to provide free medical services.

The rebels said they had executed him because talks with the government to secure the release of eight insurgent prisoners had stalled.

"We killed one of the Koreans today because the government is not being honest in talks," Ahmadi said on Wednesday.

The South Korean government, which has 200 troops serving with US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, bitterly denounced Bae's murder.

"The organisation responsible for the abduction will be held accountable for taking the life of a Korean citizen," South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun said in a statement.

"The killing of an innocent citizen cannot be justified under any circumstance or for any reason, and any such inhumane act cannot be tolerated."

The South Koreans, reportedly being held in Ghazni province about 140 kilometres (90 miles) south of the capital Kabul, were seized while travelling on the road from Kabul to Kandahar last Thursday.

At the time, the Taliban demanded that Seoul withdraw its troops. South Korea responded by saying it would pull them out as previously scheduled by the end of the year.

The Taliban are also holding a hostage from Germany, which also has troops in Afghanistan, and had demanded the withdrawal of all German forces from the war-torn country as well.

But the issue of the troops has not figured in the most recent demands by the militants, who controlled the country until being toppled from power by a US-led invasion after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

They have instead pressed for the release of insurgents in exchange for the South Koreans -- the biggest group of foreigners to be abducted during the Taliban's nearly six-year insurgency.

Any prisoner exchange would run counter to President Hamid Karzai's pledge not to allow the practice after his government in March freed five Taliban militants in exchange for an Italian reporter.

Mansour Dadullah, the militia's new military commander who took over from his slain brother in May, said in an interview with British television at an undisclosed location that he had ordered his men to take more foreigners.

"Of course, kidnapping is a very successful policy and I order all my mujahideen to kidnap foreigners of any nationality wherever they find them and then we should do the same kind of deal," he said, referring to the March swap.

The Taliban wanted to "give children a military education," he told Channel 4 news.

"We want to use children to behead infidels and spies so that they will become brave," he said.