By Marc Herwig and Rolf Schraa, dpa
BERLIN – German authorities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia said on Tuesday that they had shut down a major darknet child pornography platform with hundreds of thousands of users and arrested six suspects.
Police have arrested six male suspects, aged between 43 and 69 years old, who are being investigated for the distribution of child pornography, said the state’s interior minister, Herbert Reul.
Reul said that image and video files showing the sexual abuse of underage girls were distributed on the darknet platform. He referred to the men arrested as the “leading masterminds” behind the platform.
The crackdown followed searches which took place in six states in September, said Reul.
The amount of evidence collected is “staggering,” the minister said. In total, 1,517 items such as laptops and mobile phones were seized. The DVDs and video cassettes alone filled 94 moving boxes, Reul added.
While the exact amount of data directly related to the investigation cannot currently be estimated, Reul said that the data volume to be evaluated from the computer of a single suspect is 13.5 terabytes, which corresponds to about 3.4 million photos.
