At approximately 18:35 Standard Sirian Time on the 19th of January, the Shikoku border towards House Liberty had gone into a state of total lockdown for roughly four hours in response to unprecedented security concerns surrounding the adjacent Independent Worlds. House Liberty mirrored our decision for about the same time period shortly after.

In the name of House Kusari, I personally wish to apologize to all merchant vessels affected by this blockade and urge you to remember that such drastic measures were applied for the safety of everyone at this time and that this decision was not made lightly. Further, House Kusari understands the potential impact on individual merchant operations working with tight schedules and wishes to remind you that most Interspace Commerce Insurance contracts include dedicated policies regarding incidents unable to be normally accounted for.

For the sake of transparency to the public, we wish to explain to you what occurred that day. The Naval Forces and other state authorities reacted swiftly and dedicated to a massive spike of unidentified spacecraft activity within the Independent Worlds, which could later be identified as a combined assortment of a sizeable Lane Hacker strike group and a large amount of unmarked vessels showing immediate hostility towards our forces. Early analyses point at these vessels having been of mixed origin, including a few, presumably stolen vessels of Liberty authority technology, and manned by what has been estimated to be hired criminals and Liberty Rogues.

The unprecedented scale of criminal activity and the subsequent clashes with our border forces highlight recent escalations in crime rates around House Liberty and we strongly urge our Libertorian partners to find more efficient methods in tackling criminal activity within their borders. The organized fashion of criminal activity in this incident and the so far still unclear motives of this massive criminal force portrayal leaves House Kusari with no choice but to further bolster border security and install mobile border checkpoints for additional security. This is not to be understood as act of provocation towards Liberty but a mere safeguard for free commerce crossing the border region between both Houses. We invite House Liberty to focus primarily on their domestic security issues whilst we shall focus on erasing the overspill of crime coming from your House to such worrisome very high degree.

As investigations are still ongoing, we urge all merchants and individuals traversing through the border corridor between House Liberty and House Kusari to exert higher degrees of caution than normal and immediately report any suspicious sightings to the open communication lines of the Naval Operations Headquarters and the Nagasaki Command.