South Korea's foreign ministry confirmed Friday one of its officials received a telephone inquiry from the Associated Press on June 3 over the kidnapping of a South Korean hostage in Iraq.

The foreign ministry said it had identified the employee as an administrative official in charge of gathering information from Iraq. The official had apparently thought nothing of the inquiry and failed to report it to his superiors.

"He says he does not remember much about the phone call or that the caller was an AP employee," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Shin Bong-kil said in a news conference. All he remembered, Shin said, was the caller was a Korean-speaking individual who represented himself as a foreign correspondent.

Shin said related information on the matter had been sent to the Board of Audit and Inspection, which is currently conducting a government investigation on the controversy.

The disclosure comes not long after AP strongly hinted it may disclose more facts about its phone calls to the ministry. An AP official told KBS Friday the news agency may disclose further details, especially on the identity of the official at the ministry that AP said it contacted earlier.

AP said it had inquired the foreign ministry in Seoul in early June on whether any Korean man with the name of Kim Sun-il had been kidnapped in Iraq. It said the ministry responded that it was unaware of any such abduction in Iraq. Kim was executed by Iraqi insurgents earlier this week.

The foreign ministry this week denied it had been alerted to the Kim's kidnapping weeks earlier by AP.