Turkish police detain 32 Anonymous members

Turkish police have detained 32 people suspected of being connected to cyberactivism group Anonymous.

The suspects were held on Sunday after Turkish prosecutors and police conducted raids in 12 of Turkey's 81 provinces, the police said on Monday.

The raids come after Anonymous targeted the site for Turkey's Telecommunications Communication Presidency on Thursday.

Anonymous said it targeted the site on the grounds that the Turkish government "now wants to impose a new filtering system on the 22nd of August that will make it possible to keep records of all the people's internet activity. Though it remains opaque why and how the system will be put in place, it is clear that the government is taking censorship to the next level", according to a statement the group issued at the time.

Eight of those detained were minors, according to Reuters.

On Friday Spain's national police force said it had arrested three individuals that led the Anonymous group in Spain.

In a response, Anonymous mounted a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the police website, temporarily knocking it offline. The group also issued a press release rebutting the police force's allegation that the members had been key co-ordinators of the Spanish Anonymous operation.

"You have not detained three participants of Anonymous. We have no members and we are not a group of any kind," Anonymous wrote on Saturday. "You have, however, detained three civilians expressing themselves."

At the time of writing Anonymous had not tweeted from its account — @anonops — with reference to the Turkish detentions.