The prime minister cancelled a trip to the south of France to hold the meeting which began at 9:45 am (0745 GMT) with Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin and Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, a source close to Raffarin said.

The kidnappers from the Islamic Army in Iraq, the same group which killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni after taking him hostage, gave Paris a 48-hour ultimatum Saturday to meet its demands, Qatar-based Arabic-language Al-Jazeera television said citing "our own sources in Iraq."

The channel identified the kidnapped journalists as Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily Le Figaro and said it had received video footage of the two newsmen.

The pair went missing on August 20 after leaving Baghdad for the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Najaf, where US forces were fighting Shiite Muslim militiamen.

The group is demanding that "France rescinds within 48 hours the law banning" Islamic headscarves in schools, describing the law as "an injustice and an attack on the Islamic religion and individual freedoms," Al-Jazeera said.

The chairman of French Committee of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the umbrella body for the Muslim faith in France, Dalil Boubakeur said he was "shattered" by the "unworthy and odious blackmail" by the Islamic group that kidnapped the two newsmen.

Kidnappings of journalists and other foreigners have become common in Iraq as insurgents attempt to force countries to withdraw their troops from the war-ravaged country or extort money.

However, both Chesnot and Malbrunot's employers and Sunni Muslim scholars had earlier expressed faith that if they had been kidnapped they would be safe because France had opposed the US-led war against Iraq.

Baldoni was killed after being held for a week, Al-Jazeera had reported and said it had a videotape showing the journalist after his execution, but decided not to release it as it would be too shocking for viewers.

Baldoni's captors had threatened to execute him unless Italy withdrew its 3,000 troops from Iraq within 48 hours.

Meanwhile the French government, in crisis mode, earlier yesterday called for the release of two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq by Islamic militants demanding that Paris rescind a ban on headscarves in state schools.

"Together we ask for their release," Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said after meeting with Muslim leaders, addressing "all those who have some kind of authority or responsibility for the fate" of the two newsmen.

"France taken hostage," read the front page of the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche after the confirmation of the kidnapping of Radio France correspondent Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro newspaper.

The controversial French law, due to go into effect this week when classes resume, prohibits the wearing of "conspicuous" religious insignia -- Islamic veils, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses -- in state schools and universities.

The government introduced the law to stop what it saw as an increasingly radical stance by some students to assert their religious identity in schools in violation of a principle that such institutions should be strictly secular.

But the legislation was widely criticized in many countries in the Arab world, which charged that it was an example of blatant discrimination against Muslims.

At Mosul, insurgents armed with rocket propelled grenades fought fierce clashes with US soldiers in northern Iraq yesterday that wounded 35 Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire, police on the scene said.

The US military said it killed two of the attackers in the clashes early on Sunday around Tal Afar near the city of Mosul. There were no American casualties, the military said.

A doctor at Tal Afar hospital said the majority of the wounded were women and children, many hit by shrapnel.

Police said two separate US convoys were attacked, prompting the Americans to return fire heavily in village neighborhoods.