The Dutchman accused of launching a massive cyber attack on a spam blacklist publisher went on trial in Dordrecht on Tuesday.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis told the AD on Monday he would not appear in court personally to face charges that he was behind the 2013 attack which, some say, almost broke the internet.

Kamphuis is is accused of being behind a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a company named Spamhaus, court spokeswoman Lily Derksen told news agency AFP.

Spamhaus publishes spam blacklists and accused Dutch web-hosting service Cyberbunker of carrying out the attack after it was blocked as a rogue host. Kamphuis was said to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker at the time.

However, cyber crime experts say the story about the DDoS attack is a complicated one. And, they point out, a British teenager has already been found guilty of carrying out the attack.

British teenager

Seth Nolan Mcdonagh was arrested shortly after the attack, which according to British media he carried out when he was 16. He was sentenced to 240 hours community service in 2015 after judges agreed he should be treated leniently because he was suffering from significant mental illness.

The youth was described in court as a gun for hire’ who took down websites for those willing to pay, the BBC reported. However, other individuals, the British court was told, may also have been involved.

Kamphuis has repeatedly denied being directly involved in the DDoS attacks and told the AD via Skype the charges against him are ‘nonsense, even if I support them’.

He was arrested in Spain in 2013 and extradited to the Netherlands where he spent two months in jail on remand. He is now thought to be abroad, possibly in Barcelona or Berlin.