Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he wanted to

about the retail hacks, that they are focusing investigations on the group.who declined to answer whether or not they were Scattered Spider. "We won't answer that question" is all they said.

Two of them said they wanted to be known as "Raymond Reddington" and "Dembe Zuma" after characters from US crime thriller The Blacklist which involves a wanted criminal helping police take down other criminals on a blacklist.In a message to me, they boasted: "We're putting UK retailers on the Blacklist."There have been a series of smaller cyber attacks on UK retailers since but none as impactful of disruptive as those on Co-op, M&S and Harrods.

DragonForce offers cyber criminal affiliates various services on their darknet site in exchange for a 20% cut of any ransoms collected.Anyone can sign up and use their malicious software to scramble a victim's data or use their darknet website for their public extortion.

Nothing has appeared on the criminal's darknet leaksite about either Co-op or M&S but the hackers told the BBC they were having IT issues of their own and would be posting information "very soon."

Some researchers say DragonForce are based in Malaysia, while others say Russia. Their email to M&S implies that they are from China.But this week's searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite vague.

It all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching's statements with concrete, physical evidence.In some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard ground.

But the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble.They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings' floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath.