DUBAI (AFP) - The Al-Qaeda-linked group of Iraq`s most wanted man Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posted a video and photos on an Islamist website showing the beheading of a Japanese hostage in Iraq.
The grisly footage, posted by the "information department" of Zarqawi`s recently renamed "Al-Qaeda Group of Jihad in the Land of Two Rivers (Iraq)," showed three hooded gunmen pouncing on Shosei Koda to chop off his head.
One of them read a statement recalling that Japan had rejected the group`s demands for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq as the price for Koda`s life,.
In another statement accompanying the footage, the group said it had spurned an offer by Tokyo of "millions of dollars in ransom" in an attempt to save its citizen.
Unless Japan pulls out its soldiers "allied with the crusaders from Iraq" it will "drown, along with the crusaders and allies who are bogged down... in the mujahedeen`s hell," the statement warned.
Koda`s head was placed on his own back after the decapitation, which was carried out to the background of a song with the words: "I am a terrorist, I terrorize the enemies of (the Islamic) religion."
The decapitated remains were shown in the footage laying in a pool of blood over a US flag as gunmen held the head aloft.
Koda`s remains arrived in Kuwait from Iraq Tuesday aboard a US military plane, a spokesman for the Japanese embassy in the emirate said.
Japan`s Senior Vice Foreign Minister Shuzen Tanigawa, who arrived in Kuwait on Sunday, will travel with the body back home, the spokesman said.
Zarqawi`s group had threatened to slay Koda, 24, unless Japan pulled out its 550 troops operating in Iraq -- a demand rejected by Tokyo.
His head and decapitated body with bound hands and feet were found wrapped in a US flag Saturday in Baghdad. Koda was the first Japanese national killed in Iraq amid a wave of kidnappings.
In April, militants kidnapped three Japanese aid workers and two journalists who were released unharmed after several days of mediation.
11/02/2004 - 15:15 GMT - AFP