German police raided on Volkswagen’s headquarters, carrying away filed files and hard disks amid the investigation into massive pollution cheating scandal.
The law enforcement agency personnel also raided private apartments in Volkswagen’s hometown of Wolfsburg and other cities, prosecutors told news agency.
The raids came as Volkswagen’s US chief Michael Horn faced a grilling before Congress, where he sought to distance himself from the scandal while blaming it on engineers in Germany.
Horn told a committee that he had learned in early 2014 that the group’s ostensibly environmentally friendly diesel cars breached pollution rules.
But he said he did not know until last month that “defeat devices” had been installed deliberately in the vehicles to help them cheat US pollution tests.
The world’s largest automaker sank into the deepest crisis of its history after revealing last month that it equipped 11 million diesel VWs and Audis with software that switches the engine to a low-emissions mode during tests.
The software then turns off pollution controls when the vehicle is on the road, allowing it to spew out harmful levels of toxic gases.
