Horsemeat scandal: Criminals will be brought to be justice

 

 Several processed meat products have been withdrawn from sale after horsemeat was detected

 

Prime Minister David Cameron has promised the "full intervention of the law" will be brought to bear on those who have passed off horsemeat as beef. 

He was speaking after a meat firm near Aberystwyth and a slaughterhouse in West Yorkshire were raided by the Food Standards Agency and police.
Mr Cameron also said retailers were ultimately responsible for what they "put on their shelves".
An EU meeting about the horsemeat crisis is due to begin in Brussels.
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson will be joined at the meeting by his counterparts from the Irish Republic, France, Romania, Luxembourg, Sweden and Poland.
'True picture' Wholesaler Makro is the latest firm to announce that a "trace of horse" has been found in a brand of beef burgers. The firm had removed all frozen beef burgers from sale in January in order to test them.
"One brand Unger beef burgers 48/4oz supplied by Silvercrest Foods did contain a trace of horse. We no longer sell the Unger product," a spokesman said.

A food plant in Glasgow has been named as the source of the Waitrose beef meatballs removed from sale after tests showed they may contain pork.

Waitrose said their own Essential frozen British beef meatballs were produced at the ABP Foods-owned Freshlink factory.
A spokeswoman for ABP said: "Freshlink has carried out over 450 DNA tests during the last two-and-a-half years. All our test results have been confirmed as negative for non-declared species."
The horsemeat scandal began last month when Irish authorities discovered horsemeat in some burgers stocked by a number of UK supermarket chains.
Horsemeat has also been found in branded and supermarket-own ready meals, including lasagne and spaghetti bolognese. Some Findus frozen beef lasagne, made by a French food processing company, were found to have up to 100% horsemeat in them.
The crisis has spread across Europe as details of the convoluted supply chain in the meat industry emerged.
The FSA in the UK has ordered food businesses to carry out tests on all processed beef products and the first results are expected on Friday. They are testing for the presence of horsemeat and pork.
More than 12 food firms met Food Minister David Heath on Wednesday and they reassured him their tests would be completed by Friday.
Shadow environment secretary Mary Creagh said she wanted Mr Paterson to come back from Brussels having secured a European-wide testing regime.
"It's clear this is not just a UK problem or an Irish problem," she said. "About 16 countries have received defective products from Findus and are recalling them.
"In order to build a true picture of how far the adulteration has gone, other European countries have to start the testing we have done here."
'Cutting up' The FSA also ordered an audit of all horse-producing abattoirs in the UK. There are five abattoirs licensed to slaughter horses in the UK and last year 8,500 carcasses were exported to Italy, France and Belgium. It is not illegal to sell correctly-labelled horsemeat in the UK but there is no demand for it.
FSA director of operations Andrew Rhodes told the BBC the raids on Tuesday were a result of those investigations, and his officers had returned to the premises on Wednesday morning. The FSA suspended operations at both raided premises and seized paperwork.
"What we found was a quantity of horsemeat sent to a factory in west Wales and used in beef products when it shouldn't have been," he said.

What is not known is whether it was deliberate or a mistake, he added
The FSA has stressed that horsemeat does not pose a health risk to the public.
The raided premises were Peter Boddy Licensed Slaughterhouse, in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and Farmbox Meats Ltd, of Llandre near Aberystwyth.
The West Yorkshire plant is thought to have supplied horse carcasses to the Aberystwyth firm, which were then allegedly sold on as beef for kebabs and burgers.
Mr Boddy said he was co-operating with the FSA and officials were "welcome to visit" his premises whenever they wanted.
Dafydd Raw Rees, of Farmbox Meats, said the firm was licensed to deal with horses and it had been cutting horsemeat, from the Republic of Ireland for export to Belgium, for the last three weeks.
"I get paid to do the cutting up. We don't do kebabs, mincemeat or beef burgers. This is not a processing plant," he said.

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