in our country there have been many vigilanté murders of dealers by grieving parents or their associates; some of which have sparked off family feuds lasting generations. it happens in other European nations too, even the ones with tolerance and harm reduction; and this is Northern rather than Eastern Europe.
It is still odd to see any criminal before the courts in “peacetime” charged with crimes against victims in a completely different country.
To us this whole case looks more like a 90 year old Nazi soldier being charged for knocking down and fatally injuring another pensioner on holiday in Ibiza, Spain with his mobility scooter when he is normally resident in Sweden and this being used to nick him for all the other crimes over and above the rest of the evidence already existing.
Incidents like this do happen in Europe (although nowadays its more likely to be historical (and previously unsolved) violent or sexual offences as most Nazis are already in elderly homes or dead), but the more recent offences would not be the main part of a court case; they normally only just trigger something like a DNA or background check.
He is in some ways lucky that European nations aren’t as paranoid as AU (or maybe they are just too economically dependent on USA) as a lot of the “political activism” associated with Silk Road would be classed as attempting to destabilise democratically elected governments outside of an authorised military operation!
I do think the appearance of the darknet markets encouraged a lot of middle class young men to become drug dealers who might not previously have done so; but even the UK National Crime Agency have publically said that this has had an unexpected consequence of reducing further the violence associated with middle level drug dealing and making it easier to track patterns of problematic use.
All ambulance and police callouts are logged and geolocating darknet traffic is trivial in small European countries; they don’t need to decrypt to investigate drugs related crimes…
