The publication yesterday of a hitherto classified report relating to the assassination of Mr Yitzhak Rabin has exploded conspiracy theories suggesting Israeli secret service collusion in the killing, but also exposed appalling flaws in the service's handling of its informants.
The report was compiled in March 1996 by the Shamgar Commission, the independent panel that investigated the November 1995 assassination of Mr Rabin by a right-wing Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir.
Although most of the panel's findings were immediately made available to the public, this report was originally kept secret because it exposes much about the working methods of the Shin Bet domestic security service.
It was declassified yesterday, on the orders of the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, in the wake of the widespread publicity being given to various conspiracy theories about the assassination.
Spread mainly by right-wingers anxious to duck blame for creating the feverish anti-Rabin climate that preceded the killing, these theories revolve around the role of Mr Avishai Raviv, a close friend of Amir's who was in the pay of the Shin Bet.
But while many right-wing spokesmen have been claiming that Mr Raviv was an agent provocateur, planted by the Shin Bet in their midst to besmirch their name, the report makes clear that Mr Raviv was actually a dedicated right-wing extremist who worked as an informant for the Shin Bet, and who demonstrated far greater loyalties to the stridently anti-Arab right-wing camp than to the service.
Indeed, the report indicates, Mr Raviv exploited the fact that the Shin Bet was depending on him and protecting him from prosecution to carry out a series of attacks on Palestinians for which he would otherwise have been made to stand to trial and to spread vicious rhetoric about Mr Rabin, declaring that Jewish religious law permitted attacks on the prime minister.
Some of the conspiracy theories have alleged that Mr Raviv informed his handlers that Amir was about to kill Mr Rabin, and that either anti-Rabin elements in the Shin Bet conspired to enable the assassin to succeed, or that a plan to foil the killing at the last moment went awry.
But the report states flatly that, in discussing Amir with his handlers, Mr Raviv "did not mention, even with a hint, Amir's widespread talk of his intention to attack the prime minister."
While the report thus lays to rest the conspiracy theories, it paints a disturbing picture of chaos and incompetence in the Shin Bet, the once-vaunted Israeli intelligence service whose name has been irrevocably stained by its failure to thwart the Rabin assassination.
Mr Yasser Arafat said yesterday that Palestinians would announce independent statehood in 1999, at the end of the five-year interim peace accords with Israel, whether or not a final peace deal had been reached. Statehood would be declared, he said, "even if part of the state remains under occupation and contains settlements".