"Please help me, please help me, these might be my last hours," a sobbing Hassan said on the tape broadcast by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television.

"Please, the British people, ask Mr Blair to take the troops out of Iraq and not to bring them here to Baghdad. That's why people like Mr Bigley and myself are being caught and maybe we will die. I will die like Mr Bigley," she said, referring to the British hostage executed in Iraq earlier this month.

Al-Jazeera, which initially had an Arabic voiceover, later aired the plea in the original English.

Blair's office declined to immediately comment on the emotional plea. "We have no comment," a Downing Street spokesman told AFP in London.

Hassan's plea came one day after Britain agreed to a US request to redeploy 850 troops to Babil province south and southwest of Baghdad, freeing up US soldiers for an expected assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.

The soldiers from the Black Watch battalion had been stationed in the south of Iraq, a relatively calm region compared to the rebel heartlands near Baghdad.

"Please please please, the British people, please help me," said Hassan, as she broke down in tears.

Hassan, a dual British and Irish national who married an Iraqi and has lived in Iraq for the past 30 years, was kidnapped on her way to work in Baghdad on Tuesday.

Her call for not bringing British troops "here to Baghdad" suggested she was still in the Iraqi capital.

A Baghdad report adds: US aircraft and artillery strikes pounded suspected weapons warehouses in the insurgent bastion of Fallujah overnight leaving seven people dead and three others wounded, hospital officials said as hundreds of British troops prepared to move closer to Baghdad to help crush rebel strongholds.

The Fallujah general hospital's Dr Saleh Hussein said most victims had been evacuated from the Shuhada district.

The US army earlier said that two raids were carried out in the area late Thursday.

US marine spokesman Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert said that marines carried out new air raids and opened artillery fire at arms caches in the southeast of the city.

The marines said they were eliminating weapons warehouses in the area, considered a hub for suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

An AFP correspondent reported thunderous booms shaking the city's southern Shuhada district. Flames lit the sky, while US aircraft droned overhead, he added.

Gilbert said the attacks on the weapons warehouses were triggering secondary explosives.

Earlier, marines and insurgents clashed when rebels fired on marine positions with "small arms, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and mortars near the city" at 5:00 pm (1400 GMT), the military said.

"Marines countered these attacks with substantial and proportionate ground fires and air-delivered precision strikes."

Fallujah has seen almost daily strikes on suspected safe houses of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the car bombings and kidnappings in Iraq.

Meanwhile, a Macedonian investigative team has confirmed that two Macedonians have been executed by Islamic extremists in Iraq, but the body of a third victim is yet to be identified, officials said yesterday in Skopje.

Foreign ministry spokesman Dusko Uzunovski said the dead men had been identified from television footage as Zoran Nasovski and Dalibor Lazarevski, two of three Macedonian civilians missing in Iraq since August.

"There is enough evidence to show that there are three dead bodies on that tape and two of them are Zoran Nasovski and Dalibor Lazarevski," he told a press conference.

The fate of the third missing Macedonian, identified as Dragan Markovic, is unknown but another investigative team will soon travel to Baghdad to make further inquiries, Uzunovski said.

Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television reported Monday that an armed group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq had executed two unnamed Macedonians for allegedly spying on behalf of the United States.

It aired footage it said came from the Islamic Army, showing two men and their identity cards with the group's banner in the background.