Samir Romero, wanted by police for two murders, was killed in August. He was shot 13 times.

Karl Penhaul
CNN

This city's drug underworld is littered with "poseurs" - lowlife triggermen pretending they're the real hard cases.

But a longstanding and trusted source, with intimate knowledge of Medellin's violent subculture, assured me the two men I was about to meet were the real deal.

My destination: a single-story home in the city's notorious "Commune 13" district where I had set up a meeting with two hit men, who have for years hired their lethal services out to the cocaine cartels.

Inside the house, a man called "Red" sat on a couch toying a fully loaded 9mm Ruger pistol. "This will stop somebody nicely," he said, as I glanced at it.

His face and arms were covered in burn marks. He said it was a testament of the day a barrel of acid spilled onto him as he was working in a clandestine cocaine processing lab in northern Colombia.

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Mexican cops say Juarez street gangs are a recruiting ground for drug cartels. Karl Penhaul's exclusive report.

A family sleeps outside their destroyed house in Jabalia's Ezbet Abed Rabbo district in northern Gaza.

Karl Penhaul
CNN Correspondent

Huge freshly-printed posters were beginning to appear on billboards around Gaza City. The banners depicted masked fighters firing heavy machine guns or red-tipped rockets.

The war had ended just three or four days before. These were signs Gaza's fighting factions were still very much in business and keen to portray their campaign of the last three weeks as a victory against Israel.

CNN's producer in Gaza had been working his contacts. He's well acquainted with Gaza's underbelly.

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CNN's Karl Penhaul reports on the chaos at the Gaza-Egyptian border, with aid shipments halted and the gates firmly shut.

A side by side comparison of the footage during the rescue and the official Red Cross logo show the similarities.

Karl Penhaul
CNN Correspondent

We met our source thinking he was going to try and sell us some video filmed inside a Colombian guerrilla camp.

For a price, we thought we could get a scoop showing 15 hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three American military contractors, in the week prior to their rescue.

A Colombian military intelligence team had plucked the captives from under FARC guerrilla noses in an ingenious operation on July 2. News of the rescue and the harrowing experiences of the hostages, some of whom had been held for more than 10 years, was still big international news.

But the material was not as advertised. Instead of documenting the final days of the hostages, it documented the final days of the military's preparation for the rescue mission.

But the video did turn out to be valuable - because it put an end questions over whether the Colombian military used the Red Cross symbol to fool the rebels.

The government and Colombia’s top generals had said all along that their ruse to deceive the guerrillas into handing over their hostages involved intelligence officers posing as bogus aid workers. But they categorically denied real humanitarian emblems had been used.

But in photos our source was now showing us, one of the intelligence officers had in fact used a bib bearing the Red Cross emblem and logo of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

So what you ask? Hadn’t the mission been a rip-roaring success? Weren’t 15 long-suffering hostages now back home with their loved ones? Keep reading