Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met Saturday with Iraq's number two Ezzat Ibrahim ahead of an emergency Arab summit on the Palestinians, Egyptian officials said.
It was the first meeting between Mubarak and a senior Iraqi official since the 1991 Gulf war, when Egypt joined a US-led international coalition force to expel Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait.
No details of their meeting were immediately available.
Egyptian-Iraqi relations were broken immediately before the Gulf war but relations have improved in the last few years and this is the first time Iraq has been invited to an Arab summit in a decade.
Egypt has pleaded for a lifting of the international sanctions imposed on Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait.
Ibrahim met Friday evening with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Oman's Deputy Prime Minister for Cabinet Affairs Fahd bin Mahmud al-Said and Sheikh Rashed bin Maktum al-Maktum, deputy president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates – CAIRO (AFP)
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