Video: Journos still alive

2004-10-05 15:20

Paris - The French government has received a video of two French reporters held hostage in Iraq since August indicating that they were alive, an MP in President Jacques Chirac's ruling party said on Tuesday.

The video, believed to have been recorded on September 22, showed journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot "alive and in good health," Bernard Accoyer, the parliamentary leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, said.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin showed the cassette during a meeting earlier in the day with the leaders of France's main political parties dedicated to the hostage crisis.

"We were able to watch an especially moving cassette which showed the seriousness of events even if this cassette showed our compatriots in apparent good health," he said.

"There was at that moment a serious dimension which resumed the need for renewed national unity," he said.

Chesnot, a freelance reporter for Radio France International, and Malbrunot, a journalist for Le Figaro newspaper, were abducted on August 20 south of Baghdad along with their Syrian driver.

They are believed to be in the hands of an insurgent group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, which initially offered to release them if France rescinded a law banning Islamic headscarves in state schools. Paris refused.

The fate of the two men is currently unknown following a failed bid by another MP in the UMP party, Didier Julia, to secure their release last week in an operation disowned by Chirac and the government.

- AFP