Reporters Without Borders appeals to religious chiefs to help save kidnapped French journalists

Reporters Without Borders expressed "extreme concern" today at a threat to kill two kidnapped French journalists and called on the country's top religious authorities - the Sunni Committee of Muslim Ulemas and the Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani - to help free them. The so-called Islamic Army of Iraq, which last week executed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, said on 28 August it would kill reporters Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot if the French government did not end its ban on Muslim headscarves in schools within 48 hours. The group's video demand was broadcast by the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera. The film showed the two reporters, who said they were both in good health. The worldwide press freedom organisation said it was "deeply shocked that journalists, who are protected civilians under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, are being used in this kind of blackmail." Chesnot, a freelance with Radio France Internationale and Radio France, and Malbrunot, a senior reporter with the dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, disappeared on 20 August. Baldoni, of the Italian daily Diario della Settimana, was killed when Italy refused the kidnappers' demands that Italy withdraw its troops from Iraq.