A darknet child abuse image platform with hundreds of thousands of users has been taken offline, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul said on Tuesday.

Reul told a press conference it was not yet possible to estimate how much material there was but that the scope of the investigation was "dizzyingly large and extensive." 

What know about the investigation

Investigators said six men, aged 43 to 69 and suspected of being "leading figures behind the darkweb platform," had been arrested and taken into custody.

Chief investigator Kai-Arne Gailer told journalists the operation had been a "massive blow" against distributors of the material that would have a "lasting effect on the scene."

Gailer said the website was used "solely" to share abuse images of children.

Officials gave no estimate for the number of victims affected but said the abusive material shared on the site exclusively depicted girls.

Police arrested the men in nationwide raids at the end of September.

Officers confiscated more than 1,500 items of evidence, including laptops, computers and cell phones. In addition, there were video cassettes and DVDs, totaling 94 moving boxes.

More questions to be asked

For one accused alone, 13.5 terabytes of data had to be evaluated. With an average file size of four megabytes, this corresponds to around 3.4 million photos.

"We are still in the middle of the investigation," Gailer said, adding that police would now have to comb through the evidence collected.

Some 200 forces were deployed in the raid on the abuse platform. According to investigators last week, special units and forces such as evidence securing and arrest units, IT experts and data storage detection dogs were also involved.

Police were still investigating and would now have to comb through the evidence collected, Gailer said.

International law enforcement authorities would also conduct further investigations into suspects, he said. "There is no continent that is not affected."

rc/wmr (AFP, dpa)