ALMARIA VELLA — The Almarian National Civic Registry Authority confirmed late on Wednesday that its public-facing document portal had been subjected to a targeted intrusion over the weekend, with passport application records of tens of thousands of residents potentially exposed. Interior Secretary Dolors Esteve, in a statement from the Ministry's portico, announced an emergency allocation to accelerate the Authority's long-postponed cybersecurity overhaul and urged any citizen who had applied for travel documents within the past eighteen months to keep a watchful eye on their personal accounts.

The Parliament is to sit on the matter this morning in Almaria Vella, at the insistence of opposition deputies who have demanded a full inquiry. The Herald is told that the session will not be brief.

Señora Esteve, pressed by this paper on the question of responsibility, replied that the forensic work was in its earliest stages and that conjecture served no one. "We shall have answers," she said, "and we shall have them in the proper order." The Authority's director has not been seen in public since Tuesday.