German police raided Deutsche Bank's offices in Frankfurt on Thursday in a probe of money laundering against the country's flagship lender. Two Deutsche Bank staff members are suspected of helping clients set up off-shore businesses to launder money gained from criminal deeds. Some 170 police officers, prosecutors and tax inspectors searched six of Deutsche Bank's offices Thursday morning, Frankfurt's public prosecutor's office said in a statement. Numerous written and electronic business documents were seized, it added.

A police officer passes a gate outside the headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt, Germany, on Thursday, Nov. 29, 2018. Andreas Arnold | Bloomberg | Getty Images

"We confirm that police are currently investigating our bank at various locations in Germany. The investigation concerns the Panama Papers," Deutsche Bank said in a statement, according to a CNBC translation. "We will share more details as soon as we have them and we will cooperate with authorities," the bank added. Shares of the bank slipped toward the bottom of the European benchmark on the news, down 3.4 percent at 4.45 p.m. London time (11.45 a.m. ET).

Panama Papers

The public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt said an evaluation of data from the Panama Papers had triggered suspicion that the bank may have helped customers create offshore companies in tax havens around the world. In 2016 alone, more than 900 customers with a business volume of 311 million euros ($353.6 million) were thought to have been cared for by a Deutsche Bank subsidiary based in the British Virgin Islands, the prosecutor said. "We thought that we had provided to the authorities all the relevant information regarding Panama Papers and of course we will now cooperate closely with the prosecutors here in Frankfurt. … As it is also in our interest to clarify the facts as soon as possible," Joerg Eigendorf, global head of communications at Deutsche Bank, told CNBC's Annette Weisbach on Thursday.