IRAQ: Kidnappers have seized Egypt's envoy to Iraq, possibly in response to reports he was to become the first full-ranking Arab ambassador to the US-backed Iraqi government, diplomats and police sources said yesterday.
Ihab el-Sherif, the head of mission, was cornered by gunmen in cars while on a short trip to buy a newspaper near his home on Saturday evening and had not been heard from since, an Egyptian diplomat said.
"He was buying a newspaper when two BMWs full of gunmen blocked his way and kidnapped him," he said.
"The motives are believed to be political," he added, noting that Iraq's foreign minister had said just last week that Egypt would become the first Arab state to appoint a full-ranking ambassador to Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry, which said it was checking reports that Mr Sherif had disappeared, has yet to confirm plans to upgrade his post.
The envoy's white four-wheel drive car was standing undamaged close to a newspaper stand not far from his home.
An upgrade to full ambassadorial status for Mr Sherif on the part of Egypt, the most populous and traditionally most powerful Arab state, could enhance the standing of a new Iraqi government many Arabs view with suspicion because of its backing from the US and sectarian ties to Shia Iran.
Washington, which sees the post-invasion election held in Iraq as a model for Arab states, has been urging other Arab governments to recognise the new Baghdad administration.
More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped in the past two years. Some have been killed. Many have been released after the payment of ransoms.
Others have been used to press political demands by insurgents from the Sunni community - a minority in Iraq but the majority in most other Arab states.
A suicide bomber killed up to 20 people, mostly would-be police recruits, in Baghdad on Saturday. That evening two bombers struck police and Iraqi soldiers in the mainly Shia town of Hilla to the south, killing nine people and wounding 33.
A police source said they wore Iraqi army uniform and hit a restaurant opposite police headquarters. Near the northern oil city of Kirkuk yesterday, a car bomb blasted a police patrol at the town of Riyadh, killing two policemen.
Iraq's police are in the front line of insurgent assaults and are routinely accused by Iraqis of resorting in turn to unlawful arrests and torture - accusations publicly accepted yesterday by the government.
"These things happen, we know that," prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari's spokesman told a news briefing after a report in Britain's Observer detailed allegations of death squads and secret torture centres run by Interior Ministry forces.
"It does not happen because the government approves it or adopts it as policy," he added, saying ministers were worried.
Keen to put the abuses of the previous regime of Saddam Hussein behind them, the spokesman said the new authorities were training police and troops to respect human rights.
"But theory is one thing and practice is another," he said, adding that decades of violence had brutalised Iraqi society.
The Interior Ministry, which some leaders of Saddam's formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority accuse of sanctioning reprisals by Shia death squads, flatly denied overseeing torture and said protecting human rights was a priority.
US attorney general Alberto Gonzales has visited Baghdad to meet Mr Jaafari and other Iraqi officials, as well as US lawyers helping Iraq to a build case against Saddam and his chief aides.