Men on bail in horsemeat investigation (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Men on bail in horsemeat investigation

9:55am Monday 18th February 2013 in News

THREE men who were arrested by police investigating the horsemeat mislabelling scandal have been released on bail, as officials continued to examine evidence from three more plants.

The Food Standards Agency said that 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.

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 horsemeat will ever be known.

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 and what number of batches, so I think it is unlikely that we will ever know that. It is shocking.”