British authorities on Tuesday raided a
slaughterhouse and a meat processing company suspected of selling horsemeat
labeled as beef for kebabs and burgers, shutting them down temporarily and
seizing all the meat found.
It was the first time since the growing scandal broke across
Europe that horsemeat being marketed as beef has been traced to suppliers in
Britain, officials said, raising questions about how widespread the practice
is.
Millions of burgers and frozen meals have been recalled
around Europe and many accusations have been made, but so far it's not clear
how horsemeat got introduced into so many beef products. French authorities
have already pointed to an elaborate supply chain that involved Romanian
butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders that resulted in horsemeat disguised as
beef being sold in meals like lasagna and moussaka to consumers around the
continent.
Britain's Food Standards Agency said it suspended production
at the Peter Boddy slaughterhouse in northern England's Yorkshire and a company
it allegedly supplied horse carcasses to, Farmbox Meats, in west Wales. The
agency said it was investigating how "meat products, purporting to be beef
for kebabs and burgers, were sold when they were in fact horse."
"It is shocking that we actually found this practice
going on within the U.K.," Environment Secretary Owen Patterson said.
Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and Ireland, though in
France it is sold in specialty butcher shops. While no health effects have been
reported, the scandal has unsettled consumers and made clear that unscrupulous
dealers in the complicated network of meat wholesalers are benefiting from
selling much cheaper horsemeat as beef.
Peter Boddy, the owner of the slaughterhouse, said he would
cooperate with police, while the BBC quoted a spokesman from Farmbox Meats as
saying "there is nothing we have done here which is not totally
permissible."
Food Standards Agency director Andrew Rhodes said the
companies appeared to be involved in "blatant misleading of
customers." He declined to speculate on how long such alleged fraud may
have gone on, saying only that officials have seized documents — including
customer lists — from the two venues and are investigating how much horsemeat
was sold as beef to how many people.
Horses are slaughtered legally in abattoirs across Britain,
and the meat is exported to countries where horsemeat is eaten.
Meanwhile, authorities on the continent have not established
where the mislabeling of horse as beef occurred.
In Romania, food safety officials said Tuesday that the
country produced 6,300 tons of horse, mule and donkey meat last year, and that
it was correctly labeled when it was exported from 35 authorized plants to
other European countries.
Romanian officials have said the fraud occurred somewhere
else down the line.
In rural Romania, horses are sold from individual households
to abattoirs, and each animal has four sets of documents before the meat is exported.
The manager of a Romanian slaughterhouse implicated in the
scandal, Doly Com, defended his plant on Tuesday and tried to assuage buyers'
concerns about his company's meat.
"We have always watched closely the way we work
here....and we can guarantee one hundred percent that all the products Doly Com
puts on the market are certified from a quality and origin point of view. One
hundred percent," said Iulian Cazacut, the plant's general manager, where
horsemeat accounts for just five percent of the plant's business.
No horse was being processed Tuesday in the plant in remote
northeast Romania. Dressed in white overalls, their heads and mouths
hygienically covered, workers pierced cow and pork carcasses with sharp knives,
sawing off hunks.
The other Romanian slaughterhouse implicated in the
horsemeat scandal, Carmolimp, has also denied wrongdoing.
An Irish food company has said that burgers found to be
partially horsemeat were made from meat offcuts originating in Poland, but
Polish officials denied the country had shipped horsemeat.
Sweden's food safety authority on Tuesday said it would test
a wide range of frozen meat products sold in supermarkets to check whether they
contain horsemeat and have been mislabeled.
Peter Bradenmark, head of food control management at
Sweden's National Food Agency, told the AP that the agency would test about 50
to 100 samples from supermarkets nationwide.
"What's happened is alarming," he said. "Food
companies are sincere and they want to do the right thing. But sometimes things
go wrong unintentionally, and unfortunately, at times it's intentional."
