Russia's Foreign Ministry called Wednesday on the kidnappers of four Russian Embassy staffers in Iraq to spare their lives after an al-Qaida-led insurgent group said in a web statement it had decided to kill them.

"We once again strongly urge not to take an irreparable step and preserve the lives of our people," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement.

The ministry spokesman said that the four kidnapped Russian Embassy personnel were representatives of a country "which has never and nowhere waged a war against Islam." One of them is a Muslim, he said.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council said Moscow failed to meet its demands for a full withdrawal of troops from the war-torn region of Chechnya and that a 48-hour deadline set in a statement issued on Monday had run out.

"Therefore, the Islamic court of the Mujahedeen Shura Council decided to implement God's law sentencing them (the four Russians) to death," the group said in a statement on an Islamic militant website where it often posts its statements.

The Shura Council is a grouping of seven Iraqi insurgent groups, most prominent among them al-Qaida in Iraq, which on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the slaying of two kidnapped US soldiers.

The statement did not state that the Russians were killed. The four embassy workers were abducted on June 3 in an attack on their car near the Russian Embassy building in Baghdad in which a fifth Russian was killed. The authenticity of the statement could not be confirmed Wednesday.

(China Daily June 22, 2006)