IRAQ: Militants holding two French journalists hostage in Iraq gave France another 24 hours last night to agree to their demands and scrap a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools, Al Jazeera reported.
The Arabic TV station showed a tape of the two journalists urging the French people to hold protests to persuade their government to retract the headscarf law or they might be killed.
The kidnappers gave the French government one more day to overturn the ban after a previous 48-hour deadline expired yesterday, Al Jazeera said, quoting a written statement.
France has scrambled to save Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, both of whom spoke on the video tape.
"I call on President (Jacques) Chirac to ... retract the veil ban immediately and I call on French people to protest the veil ban. It is a wrong and unjust law and we may die at any time," Chesnot said, according to Al Jazeera's translation into Arabic.
Thousands of people took to France's streets to demonstrate yesterday and Foreign Minister Mr Michel Barnier visited Egypt as part of a mission to rally support in Iraq and the region.
He made an impassioned plea to the Islamic Army in Iraq to free the journalists.
The militant group, which last week said it had killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, on Saturday gave the French government 48 hours to rescind the headscarf ban, without saying what would happen to the two Frenchmen if it failed to comply.
"We will continue, come what may, to follow all contacts ... with civil and religious personalities to explain the reality of the French republic ... and obtain the release of these people," Mr Barnier said in Cairo. Mr Barnier said Foreign Ministry Secretary-General Mr Hubert Colin de Verdiere arrived in Baghdad yesterday for crisis talks.
Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslim groups and Islamic groups outside Iraq urged the kidnappers to release the two, noting France's opposition to the US-led Iraq war and saying journalists were not combatants.
The crisis stunned France, which campaigned against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and so had considered itself relatively safe from militant attack. France also opposed the 1990-2003 economic sanctions on Iraq.
Chesnot, of Radio France Internationale, and Malbrunot, who writes for the dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, disappeared on August 20th on their way from Baghdad to Najaf, the day after Baldoni was seized.
Many Muslim women in headscarves joined French protests for their freedom. Some 200 people took to the streets of eastern Strasbourg and about 3,000 demonstrated in Paris.
"The hostage-taking risks making public opinion in France turn against women and girls who wear headscarves," one of the veiled protesters in Paris said in front of the headquarters of Radio France Internationale, Chesnot's employer.
Islamic groups in Iraq sympathised with the French. "France's position toward Iraq is good. But we also are against kidnapping all journalists," said Sheikh Abdel Sattar Abdel Jabbar, a top official in the Muslim Clerics Association. Outside Iraq, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest Islamist organisation, and the Federation of Arab Journalists spoke out against the kidnapping.
Al Jazeera said all kidnapped journalists should be released. "This clearly means a call for the immediate release of the French journalists held hostage," Al Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout said.