Europe - Police on Wednesday arrested 10 people in a series of raids across Europe designed to crack down on file-sharing.

Police targeted 48 sites in countries including Britain, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Hungary.

The suspects were the alleged leaders of four illegal file-sharing networks and were charged with hacking, piracy and computer fraud.

Five of the arrests were in Belgium and the others were made in Norway and Sweden.

By Wednesday evening, all of the suspects arrested in Sweden had been released, following the raid of seven premises were raided including PRQ, a web hosting firm with links to the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

However, Paul Pinter, Swedish police coordinator, said on Wednesday that the raids were unconnected to Pirate Bay or WikiLeaks.

Co-ordinated by Belgian police, the operation was the culmination of a two-year investigation.