Wednesday, June 20, 2007

"Bearing the stamp of Preventative Security, and marked "Highly Secret", the single dirty document on the ground instructed the reader to assemble information on one Abdel Rahman Salah Shadeh Karnua. But it was a rarity among the papers scattered among the detritus in the yard. Most of the secret files of the most hated - by Hamas - Palestinian security apparatus had been carefully collated and spirited away by the victorious Islamic faction after what had been the most decisive as well as the bloodiest engagement of the five-day civil war. Few of the hundreds more scattered documents were as tantalising, a salary slip here showing an officer's pay of 1800 shekels a month, a ripped and trodden-on photograph there of Rashid Abu Shbak, after Mohammed Dahlan, the Fatah security chief most demonised by Hamas's military wing."