DUBAI, Aug 29 (AFP) - The package sent to an Arabic television station announcing the abduction of French newsmen Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot contained no explicit death threat but none was needed.
The grisly record of the Islamic Army in Iraq, which has already claimed the killing of three foreign hostages, was enough to hammer home the seriousness of the danger hanging over the two Middle East specialists.
Since its first statements in March, the shadowy Sunni Muslim militant group has never failed to deliver on its ultimatums and has not hesitated to execute an Italian journalist and two Pakistanis it was holding.
It was also one of two groups which claimed the March 31 murders of four US contractors, and the gruesome mutilation of two of them, in the notorious Sunni insurgent bastion of Fallujah.
Those deaths sparked a month-long US military onslaught on the town in the killing fields west of Baghdad.
The group only spared the life of Philippine truck driver Angelo de la Cruz after Manila bowed to demands for an early withdrawal of its troops from Iraq in July.
The group has also announced it is holding Fereydun Jahani, diplomat for Iraq's Shiite neighbour Iran, bugbear for the country's ousted Sunni elite.
He too went missing as he headed south from Baghdad towards the Shiite heartland through Sunni towns that have become bywords for militancy.
But the main Sunni religious organisation, the Committee of Muslim Clergy, which appealed late Saturday for the French duo's release, has cast doubt on whether the Islamic Army really exists.
The clerics charge it is in reality just a label of convenience for third parties with ulterior motives, in this case "to harm the friendship between the Iraqi and French people."
It is indeed the first time that French nationals have been targeted in the deadly insurgency in the Sunni belt north and west of Baghdad, Paris having vigorously opposed the US-led ouster of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
In the statement sent to Qatar-based news channel Al-Jazeera accompanied by video footage of the two journalists, the group announced it was "holding two French hostages abducted by one of the Army's brigades."
It called on France to lift its ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in its defiantly secular state schools, "because it is unjust and hostile toward the Islamic religion and personal freedoms in a so-called democratic country".
"We give France a period of 48 hours to respond to this statement from the time it is published. God is great and glory be to God," the brief statement concluded.
On the accompanying videotape aired by Al-Jazeera around 1900 GMT Saturday, the 37-year-old Chesnot was heard saying in Arabic: "We are with the brothers of the Islamic Army in Iraq."
Speaking in French, his colleague Malbrunot said: "I want to first tell my family that everything is fine."
Neither journalist had been heard from since August 20, when they left Baghdad for the Shiite holy city of Najaf, intending to cover the clashes then raging between US troops and rebel militiamen.
The two separate takes of video showed the hostages standing before a black banner bearing the legend Islamic Army in Iraq in bold red letters against a map of the country overlain by a Kalashnikov rifle.
It was the same backdrop shown in previous videotapes sent to Al-Jazeera to announce the abduction and then the killing of Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, correspondent of the weekly Diario della Settimana.
In Baldoni's case, the group had warned that it "cannot guarantee the Italian's safety ... if Italy does not respond within 48 hours with a decision to withdraw its troops from Iraqi territory."
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government failed to comply.
In the case of the two Pakistanis, video footage released on July 26 announced starkly that it had been "decided to execute the pair" as an investigation had shown they were working for the US military.
Two days later, the Islamic Army announced their execution and the release of their Iraqi driver "after it became apparent he had been deluded and repented."
The Amman-based Chesnot is the author of a 1993 book on the struggle between Israel and the Arab states for the Middle East's scant water resources. Malbrunot specialised in Palestinian affairs and had long followed the intifada from his base in Jerusalem.