By Lee Jin-woo
Staff Reporter
South Korea Sunday dispatched a group of investigators to Iraq to examine the suspicious death of a 27-year-old army officer, the first military casualty in the country since troops were deployed there in 2004.
First lieutenant Oh, serving with the Zaytun Unit on a peace and reconstruction mission in Irbil, a city in northern Iraq, was found shot dead inside the unit's base at 1:45 p.m. (Iraqi local time) Saturday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in Seoul announced.
``1st Lt. Oh was found shot to death at a hospital barber shop of the Zaytun Unit Saturday,'' the JCS said.
The unit is investigating the cause of the incident on its own, but an official announcement on Oh's death will only be made after three investigators from Seoul carry out a more thorough investigation.
No signs of infiltration from outside or fighting in the base has been discovered so far, according to the Ministry of National Defense.
Two other officers from the ministry headquarters and bereaved family members also left for the war-torn country by way of Dubai.
Oh was found lying prone with a gunshot wound in his jaw, defense ministry officials said quoting a serviceman of the medical administrative affairs team on the scene. A K-2 rifle and an empty cartridge were also found next to Oh they added.
Oh was serving with the medical administrative affairs unit since his deployment on April 26 as the second batch of the sixth troop rotation.
Irbil, about 350 kilometers north of Baghdad, is the region where 1,200 South Korean troops are deployed with a mission of helping Iraq¡?s post-war rehabilitation efforts. The troop size was cut to 1,200 from over 3,000 following a motion passed by the National Assembly last year. The motion calls for the troops¡? withdrawal from Iraq by the end of this year.
The South Korean unit, which mostly consists of engineers and medics, has performed a variety of reconstruction projects to better the lives of residents of the Kurdish-controlled city since 2004.
Seoul has planned to draw up a timetable for the pullout of the troops in the first half of this year.
In 2004, a South Korean translator was kidnapped and beheaded by a group of armed insurgents in Iraq, despite Seoul's efforts to rescue him.
In February, Staff Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, who was serving as an English interpreter in Afghanistan since last September as a member of the Dasan Engineering Unit, was killed.
Yoon was the first soldier killed in action outside Korea since the Vietnam War. He was posthumously promoted from sergeant to staff sergeant and awarded the National Order of Merit.