Gunmen who seized Egypt's top envoy to Iraq had yet to contact authorities or present any demands, Egyptian and Iraqi officials said today.
Ihab el-Sherif was snatched by gunmen from a Baghdad street on Saturday days after Iraq indicated he was soon to become the first Arab diplomat with the rank of ambassador since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
His kidnapping was a setback to efforts by US and Iraqi diplomats to persuade Arab states to give more legitimacy to Iraq's Shia and Kurdish-led government by upgrading ties.
But there was progress on the political side, with a committee that is to draft Iraq's new constitution announcing it would convene with new Sunni Arab members this week for the first time.
Washington and Baghdad are trying to use both diplomacy and politics to defuse a Sunni Arab insurgency that has grown more violent since the government took power in April.
Iraq's parliament formally welcomed 15 Sunni Arab members to the committee tasked with writing a new constitution, making it the first national political body to include significant Sunni Arab representation since the January election. Committee chairman Humam Hamoudi said the Sunnis would join other members on Tuesday.
"We will show (the new members) the drafts we have reached so far," he told reporters. The committee was expanded to 71 members to include the Sunnis in the hope of defusing the insurgency.
Previously there were just two Sunnis, because the constitution writers were drawn from members of parliament elected in the January vote that most Sunnis boycotted.
The committee, which must agree on a draft constitution by August 15th ahead of an October referendum, would have its first full meeting on Wednesday, Hamoody said. "On Wednesday we will begin serious discussions to see what we agree on and what we don't agree on," he said.
"Then we will discover what are the sensitive issues." He said the main bones of contention would probably be the extent to which the constitution described Iraq as an Arab state, and the boundaries and degree of autonomy of regions like the mainly Kurdish - non-Arab - north.