German police shut down website selling explosives

German police shut down website selling explosives
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By Reuters
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BERLIN (Reuters) - About a thousand police officers launched raids on Tuesday in Germany, Lithuania and Croatia as part of a cybercrime investigation into a website that provided details on how to produce explosives and synthetic drugs.

Police in the central German city of Goettingen coordinated the raids, which searched 34 buildings, questioned 22 suspects and seized 127kg of chemicals used for making explosives, as well as fuses and detonators.

Police also found weapons, ammunition and chemicals for making synthetic drugs.

The website, www.xplosives.net, was frozen, with its usual content replaced by a message from German prosecutors: "This domain and its criminal content have been seized."

Police said in a statement that the domain belonged to an online forum with about 3,000 registered members, 360 of whom had actively participated in 2018.

Police are now investigating the operators of the platform and its users on suspicion of weapons, explosives and narcotics crimes.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson, editing by Ed Osmond)

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