DUBAI, Aug 30: Militants holding two French journalists hostage in Iraq gave France another 24 hours on Monday to agree to their demands and scrap a ban on 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 on Monday, 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. 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," Barnier said in Cairo.

Iraqi groups urged the kidnappers to release the two, noting France's opposition to the occupation and saying journalists were not combatants. -Reuters