The ban was imposed by the Iraqi Information Ministry, which ordered that Al Jazeera's Iraqi correspondent Diar al-Omari to stop reporting and visiting correspondent Tayseer Allouni to leave Iraq, the channel announced early Thursday.

"Regretting this decision, Al-Jazeera has decided to suspend its live broadcast from Iraq and will only broadcast recorded items received from Iraq," the station announced.

The Iraqi Information Ministry did not give any reason for imposing the ban on Al Jazeera, which has been harshly criticized by US officials as pro-Iraq.

Iraq already expelled the reporting team of the leading US TV news network CNN late last month.

On Tuesday, a group of journalists who disappeared from a Baghdad hotel turned up safely in Jordan after a week in prison. But an Australian newspaper said two of its staff had been detained in Iraq.

The group included two reporters for the New York-based US newspaper Newsday, Matthew McAllester and Moises Saman, who had been detained for at least a week in Baghdad.

Hundreds of journalists from across the world are in Iraq to cover the US-led war, including those working from Baghdad and those embedded with US and British forces.

(Xinhua News Agency April 3, 2003)