CNS Staff Reports

Reports that Alliance citizens have been taken into custody and held without charge in the wake of the events of November 7 remain impossible to confirm, as government officials refuse to release the name, number or location of persons in "extraordinary detention".

Now a new source of confusion and anxiety surrounds the seizure of ships and crews in the exclusion zones declared during the operations against Caliban and Shadow. In the latter case in particular, large numbers of craft and people remain unaccounted for, including cases where witnesses confirm they had escaped the areas under attack.

A military source who declined to be identified for this report told CNS that "persons remaining in the exclusion zone after the beginning of the operation were designated as enemy combatants, and will be processed to determine whether they pose a continuing threat to the security of the Alliance." This source refused to state the nature of the process, or when anxious relatives and the public can expect to learn whether missing persons are in fact in custody and where.

Relatives of missing persons have petitioned military and government officials, but report receiving no assistance. In one case, a mother whose two small children were aboard a ship bound from Shadow to Persephone cannot determine their whereabouts, or those of the ship.

"I don't know what to believe," she told our reporter. "If the military has them, wode ma, why won't they tell me? And if not, tian shaode!"