Horsemeat evidence given to Interpol
Evidence seized from three UK premises as part of the horsemeat investigation is handed to Europol.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said it had passed on evidence from two premises in Tottenham and one in Hull to Europol – the European Union’s law enforcement agency – after investigators, accompanied by police officers and local authority officials, removed meat samples for testing for horsemeat.
The move comes after Dafydd Raw-Rees, 64, the owner of Farmbox Meats near Aberystwyth, and a 42-year-old man, were arrested in Wales on Thursday on suspicion of offences under the Fraud Act.
A 63-year-old man was also arrested on suspicion of the same offence at Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
The men have been released pending further inquiries and will return to answer bail in Aberystwyth at a later date, Dyfed Powys Police said.
The FSA has conceded it is unlikely the exact number of people in the UK who have unwittingly eaten horse meat will ever be known.
Testing ‘the right way to address issue’
Chief executive Catherine Brown said that testing was the right way to address the issue, and said the focus would be on areas of higher risk.
But she admitted that the number of people who had unknowingly eaten horse meat was likely to be impossible to ascertain.
“I don’t think that we ever will (know how many), because these tests are a snapshot, so even where we find things it is very hard to work out how long, what number of batches, so I think it is unlikely that we will ever know that. It is shocking,” she told the BBC.
Her comments came as the head of a major UK supermarket chain insisted that the horse meat scandal was not “the tip of an iceberg”.
Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury’s told BBC’s Newsnight programme that supermarkets had not been slow to react to the scandal, but conceded there was a long way to go before the food industry could fully explain how the crisis has come about.