Filesharing site The Pirate Bay remains offline after a Swedish police raid yesterday, despite reports that the site had been restored at a Costa Rican domain.

Visitors to the site are shown the familiar homepage but are unable to search for content, due to the website being nothing more than a proxy for the main site hosted out of Sweden.

Police raided the website’s hosting provider in Stockholm yesterday after a complaint was filed by the Rights Alliance, which campaigns against piracy and is also based in the Swedish capital.

Sara Lindback, the chief of Rights Alliance, said: "The Pirate Bay is an illegal commercial service that makes considerable earnings by infringing the works of others. The infringements affect all creators and it also hinders the growth of the legal services."

Filesharing prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden that "a number of police officers and digital forensics experts" were at the raid, during which "several servers and computers were seized".

As of yet no evidence has emerged that the domains hosting the site have been seized, with the main one carrying the Swedish .se domain extension.

In the past the site has proved resilient to police action, though its three founders have all faced arrest or prison time during the last year over a range of charges.