L Walker 
Updated August 17th, 2021
A Cold War bunker in a small German town housed darknet internet servers that facilitated illegal online activity. The group allegedly operating the servers are on trial.
After 22 months of pre-trial detention, a defendant of the cybercrime trial is allowed to leave after a partial confession. The defendant admitted to having closed his eyes to the criminal portals that were hosted in the bunker, reports the Trierische Volksfreund. The arrest warrant against him was suspended last Monday, the spokesman for the Trier regional court said on Friday.
At the beginning of the major cybercrime process in October 2020, one of the alleged main organizers testified. According to the indictment, the Dutchman was active as a “kind of manager” in the Traben-Trarbach facility.
In the bunker on the Moselle, criminal transactions are said to have run on hundreds of servers in the Darknet. The illegal marketplace DarkMarket is said to have been hosted there at times.
But not so “bulletproof”
The so-called bulletproof hoster only forbade its customers to use child pornography or terrorist content on their website. “Everything else is fine,” said the Stay Online Policy des Hosters.
The cyberbunker’s website promised secure and anonymous web hosting – with almost no rules.
The public prosecutor’s office accuses the eight defendants of complicity in around 250,000 crimes, including drug deals worth millions, data theft, computer attacks, and counterfeit money and arms deals. They are said to have hosted the illegal websites and thus aided in the crimes committed by their customers. Hundreds of police officers dug the “cyber bunker” in autumn 2019.
The process is currently in the summer break and will continue at the end of August. According to the court, it is unclear when the taking of evidence could be closed.
The procedure is scheduled until the end of 2021.
