Ukrainian authorities appear to have raided the hosting company behind Demonoid, according to reports from TorrentFreak. Demonoid is one of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker sites, and it had previously been chased out of Canada five years ago. More recently, Demonoid had been under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, first reported on July 27.

The United States Trade Representative mentioned Demonoid by name (PDF) on its Notorious Markets List in a report as recently as December 2011. That report said that the site’s administrator had been arrested “recently” on the authority of the Mexican attorney general—the admin has reportedly been operating out of Mexico.

Media representatives of the USTR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Ukrainian newspaper Kommersant reported (Google Translate) Monday that, according to an anonymous source within the Ukrainian Interior Ministry known only as “B,” the raid was timed with a particular political purpose in mind. First Vice Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky recently visited the United States, where he met with United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk to discuss various free-trade issues, including copyright protection.

Demonoid had taken steps to avoid prosecution by Ukrainian authorities, including blocking all access from Ukrainian IP addresses.

The raid was conducted by investigators of the Anti-Cyber Research Affairs in Kiev. It came after what a staffer at its Ukrainian host, ColoCall (also known as “B”) described to Kommersant as coming just after the DDoS attack. After that, ColoCall noticed a “hacker break-in” on Demonoid’s servers. ColoCall also did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” B of ColoCall added. “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.”

The staffer also said that Demonoid has “multiple backup servers,” and the site’s administrator could restore it “in 15 minutes.”

"However, judging by the fact that the management of the site [hasn’t done so,] most likely the tracker [has been] closed forever," he added.

UPDATE: Carol Guthrie, a spokesperson for the USTR, e-mailed Ars to say: "My understanding is that neither Demonoid nor the Notorious Markets List was raised at last week’s U.S.-Ukraine Trade and Investment Cooperation Council meeting."