The Taleban claimed to have killed a second South Korean hostage yesterday, only hours after the Afghan Government said that it had negotiated a stay of execution for the group of Christians held captive in the country.

According to Marajudin Pathan, the governor of Ghazni province, where 23 South Korean Christians were snatched on July 17, the Taleban had agreed to extend the deadline for the 22 surviving hostages until noon tomorrow. Taleban rebels now appear to have issued a bloody rejection of this agreement.

“We set several deadlines and the Afghan Government did not pay attention to our deadlines,” Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a spokesman, said. “Finally, tonight at 8.30 [local time] we killed one of the Koreans named Sung Sin with AK47 gunshots.” He added that the rebels had dumped the body in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province.

The news came as the body of the first Korean killed was returned to his relatives in South Korea. The family of Pastor Bae Hyung Kyu, whose bullet-riddled body was found last week, refuse to hold a funeral or memorial service until the eighteen men and four women kidnapped with him are released.

Bae Shin Kyu, the brother of the dead pastor, said that the body would remain with the family until some resolution on the 22 other church members had been reached. “The parents as well as the widow of Pastor Bae are just focused on returning the 22 people unhurt. Pastor Bae would have wished for that too.”

A video purporting to show seven of the female hostages was broadcast last night on al-Jazeera television. The women in the undated silent video were wearing headscarves, and appeared to be unharmed.

The South Koreans, who were kidnapped while travelling by bus from Kabul to Kandahar more than a week ago, were officially in Afghanistan to carry out aid work. Their plight has not been helped by suspicions that they were actually in the devoutly Muslim country to spread their evangelical Christian faith.

The Taleban have set numerous deadlines for their demands to be met and have said that if 23 Taleban prisoners are not released from Afghan jails they will continue killing the South Koreans. It is unlikely that the Afghan Government will release any prisoners in exchange for the South Koreans despite the Taleban threats.

In March five senior Taleban prisoners were released after Italian authorities threatened to withdraw their troops if the kidnapped journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo was not returned unharmed. Despite criticism from the United States and Britain, President Karzai grudgingly gave in to the pressure but insisted that the deal was never to be repeated.

Karim Rahimi, an Afghan government spokesman, said in March: “This was an exceptional case and it will never happen again.” South Korea has only 200 non-combat troops in the country so is unable to exert the same pressure as Italy, which has about 1,800 troops.

The deal was also criticised heavily by American and British officials, and Mr Karzai will be unwilling to upset them further while their troops bear the brunt of fighting a resurgent Taleban in the east and south.

Mr Karzai has condemned the kidnapping, particularly of the women, as un-Islamic. In a meeting with Baek Jong Chun, a South Korean envoy, he criticised the kidnapping of “foreign guests, especially women, as contrary to the tenets of Islam”.

This view was echoed by Afghanistan’s national council of clerics, the main religious body in the country. It said that Prophet Muhammad had emphasised that no one had the right to kill women. “Even in the history of Afghanistan, in all its combat and fighting, Afghans respected women, children and elders,” the council said. “The killing of women is against Islam, against the Afghan culture, and they shouldn’t do it.”

The Afghan Government has sent a high-level delegation to the Qarabagh district of Ghazni, where the Christians are being held. Delegates include Mullah Abdul Salaam Rocketi, a former Taleban commander and now a Member of Parliament, and village elders. Mullah Rocketi, so named because of his skill in shooting down Russian helicopters with a rocket launcher, said that it was Afghan government policy that “women should be released first”.

The Taleban insist that they have every right to kill women. Qari Yousef Ahmadi said that, because international forces were holding women in military bases in Bagram and Kandahar, the deaths would be justified under the religious tenet “an eye for an eye”.

He said: “It might be a man or a woman . . . We may kill one, we may kill two, we may kill one of each [gender], two of each, four of each. Or we may kill all of them at once.”

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