Ihab al-Sherif, Egypt's ambassador to Iraq, was kidnapped yesterday.
He's been in Iraq for five weeks, and is the first and only ambassador from an Arab nation -- this makes him a target, as he represents Arab legitimization of the Iraqi invasion, to some.
Al Jazeera indicates that while Egypt had upgraded its contacts in Iraq to embassy status, it was not explicitly clear that al-Sherif was the ambassador. More from The Al Jazeera story:
Egypt has been training Iraqi security forces and civil servants under a US-backed international programme and on Friday about 140 Iraqi civil servants arrived in Cairo.
Al-Sherif had served as charge d' affairs in Syria and Israel before being transferred to Iraq and is the second Egyptian diplomat to have been captured in Iraq.
Muhammad Mamdouh Helmi Qutb, then Egypt's third-ranking diplomat, was briefly detained in July 2004 by a group of fighters who claimed they wanted to deter Egypt from deploying troops in Iraq.
The top CNN story is about a missing blond in Aruba.