Pirate Gang caught red-handed in Naval Shipyard
Placid: In an operation coordinated by the Internal Security department of the Federation Navy and the Federal Intelligence Office, a group of criminals thought to be associated with the Guristas have been caught trying to remove a decommissioned Navy Megathron from a so-called 'Ship Graveyard'.
Guilliere Thezanne, an experienced intelligence operative, was in control of the operation for the Federation Navy. In a press conference he revealed "My agents spent many hours viewing holoreels from the sites of previous incursions, and discovered a pattern between ships going missing and certain travellers being in the systems. It was obvious that the holoreels had been tampered with; a few had blocks of up to an hour erased and overwritten with other data. The FIO released stargate activation logs to allow us to cross reference the data, and the evidence suggested a number of names who were behind some of these thefts. It was then a simple case of monitoring communications transmissions between the suspects, and when it was clear they were planning a new heist, we beefed up the defences."
Thezanne continues “The plan worked perfectly. An unregistered Badger class industrial, seemingly crippled and without any signs of life, approached the complex with distress signals being transmitted. A team comprised of the bases' security forces boarded the Badger to examine the ship. It was at this point, no doubt using a trick learned from Korako Kosakami himself, that the boarding team were gassed and subdued.
More than three hundred members of this criminal gang then disembarked, and went about their business in an obviously well practiced manner. A skeleton crew and engineers headed for the target ship, whilst electronic experts began falsifying the docking logs and the holoreel recordings. A team of around sixty thugs set about disarming the remainder of the bases' security, while a group of pharmacists concentrated on injecting the guards with a combination of narcoleptic and amnesic drugs.
The trap was sprung. Four companies of Federation Navy Marines, who were concealed in the cargo bays of decommissioned ships, began their ambush. After a brief firefight, where twenty-seven of the pirates were killed and sixteen wounded, the raiders realised they were outgunned and surrendered to the Federation forces. They were all imprisoned and are awaiting trial at an undisclosed location.”
The operation leaves more questions than it answers though. How did this band of criminals manage to get intricate plans of the locations and the defences of these Ship Graveyards? Why was the automatic intrusion alarm not triggered? Thezanne refused to shed any light on this, stating that "The operation and investigation is still ongoing. This was just a battle; the war is not won yet."
There have been suggestions in the popular press that the ships are going missing as a result of an inside job. Chief Archivist for The Scope, Devalon Nobreler, had this to say "This is nothing more than idle chatter. At first glance, there does seem to be an awful lot of information here that shouldn't be accessible to the public; but with the recent advances in Scanner technology and the various new electronic devices available, I guess anything can be possible for criminals with the right connections, the manpower, the money and the motivation."
