CONCORD Confirms Amarr Ceremony Disrupted By 'Joint-Strike' Military Operation
2003.11.24 | Svarthol
AMARR – CONCORD authorities today confirmed that several military Special Forces units “from traditionally opposing factions” converged on the Theology Council Tribunal station during the Amarr Championship Award Ceremony and engaged in a fierce firefight that left all of the elite tactical units, dozens of station security personnel, and 7 high-ranking advisors and military officers loyal to Doriam Kor-Azor dead. No survivors were left at the scene, and the identities of the attackers are unknown. CONCORD crime scene investigators revealed that there were at least three different “tactical unit teams” involved in the fight: Two were exclusively comprised of Amarr elements, and the other was exclusively Minmatar.
“The Amarr teams arrived on separate days sometime before the actual day of the awards. One team was posing as engineers, the other as priests, of all things,” stated Kedrick Brannon of CONCORD’s Criminal Investigations Task Force. “The third team arrived in a Bestower at about 1500 GMT the day of the awards as slaves, shackled and processed like normal. They had help from the inside, because about 20 minutes after their arrival they were loose and armed to the teeth. Someone must have stowed weapons for them somewhere in the station ahead of time. The Amarr authorities got a hold of that Bestower skipper before we could, by the way. No one’s heard from him since.”
When asked what the commando’s objective was, Brannon answered “Well, that’s the interesting part. A lot of Kor-Azor brass was aboard for the award ceremony, and it seems that the ‘objective’ had to do with them. Whether they intended to interrogate them, force them to access classified information, or steal some physical possessions, we just don’t know. The intel guys are fairly certain that several of Kor-Azor’s people had ‘intimate knowledge’ of Heideran’s ‘ghost ship’—the battleship coffin that Chamberlain Karsoth mentioned during the award ceremony.
“But what we were shocked to find out was that all three teams were there for the same thing, acting on the exact same intelligence, planned almost identical tactical missions, yet were completely independent of one another. They were all sent by different entities that we’re still trying to discover. All of them reached the officer’s deck at almost the exact same time. We have camera footage showing the three teams pointing their rifles at each other, nervously switching targets back and forth between opposite teams, screaming to lower their weapons. Meanwhile, Kor-Azor’s people are all face down on the floor with their hands behind their heads…it was just a surreal scene.”
“The astonishing thing is that it was one of the Amarr squads that fired first, and at the other Amarr squad, no less. The room erupted in gunfire. The camera footage stops abruptly, but not before it captured some pretty graphic scenes, too gory to reveal here. Not more than two or three minutes after that firefight started, all of the gates leading into the Amarr system mysteriously malfunctioned, and ships trying to undock from stations within the Amarr system had their camera drones locked down. Then the entire ceremony was moved to a closed comms channel, presumably for security reasons. Although the Amarrs emphatically deny having anything to do with the gate malfunctions and drone lockdown, we’re looking into the matter closely.”
Asked why the commandos would choose the day of the award ceremony to launch the attack, Brannon answered “We’re baffled by that decision ourselves. There were hundreds of ships parked in orbit around Amarr Prime waiting for the ceremony to begin when they attacked. There was a much higher volume of ship traffic than usual at all three stations in the system at that time. It’s clear that the congregation of Kor-Azor personnel presented such an enticing ‘target of opportunity’ for the commandos that whomever sent them decided it was worth the risk.”
On whether or not there were survivors: “None whatsoever, and all of the Kor-Azor officers—7 in all—were killed, some by crossfire, some intentionally executed. And make sure the record states that the coroner is pulling Amarr bullets from their corpses, not Minmatar ones. The room and adjacent hallways were the battle took place is a forensic ballistics nightmare, a total war zone. Between the limited camera footage and the analysis of the scene, we’ve also determined that one of the Amarr teams and the sole Minmatar team was actually working with each other against the second Amarr team, and then finally against the station security personnel, who eventually overwhelmed them. We don’t know how they planned on escaping, if at all, but it was clear that they had no intentions of being taken alive.”
Audio transcripts of the camera footage are currently classified “due to the extremely volatile nature of the situation” and that “analysis of the audio has brought to light some sensitive information that would hurt the current investigation if released to the public prematurely”, undoubtedly implying that there are some leads as to who is responsible for the attacks.