German authorities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia said on Tuesday they had shut down a major darknet child pornography platform with hundreds of thousands of users. The state’s interior minister, Herbert Reul, said that the crackdown followed searches which took place in six states in September. Six suspects are in custody. The amount of evidence collected is “staggering,” Reul 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. However, the exact amount of data directly related to the…