Three U.K. arrests in horsemeat scandal

PARIS French authorities on Thursday named a French meat wholesaler as the main culprit in Europe's spreading horsemeat scandal, declaring that officials at Spanghero knowingly passed off cheap horsemeat as ground beef for frozen food sold around the continent.

Police in Wales, meanwhile, announced the arrests Thursday of three men on suspicion of fraud at two meat plants inspected earlier this week by the U.K.'s Food Standards Agency.

The two developments were part of an escalating food scare that has raised questions about food controls in the borderless European Union — and highlighted how little consumers know about the complex trading operations that get food from producers to wholesalers to processers to stores and onto their dinner table.

Europol, the European Union police agency, is coordinating a continent-wide fraud investigation amid allegations of an international criminal conspiracy to substitute horse for more expensive beef.

In Paris, Benoit Hamon, the government's consumer affairs minister, said it appeared that fraudulent meat sales had been going on for several months, and reached across 13 countries and 28 companies. He said there was plenty of blame to go around, but most of it rested with Spanghero, a wholesaler based in southern France.

Officials at Spanghero denied knowingly buying and reselling horsemeat but French authorities immediately suspended their trading activities.

Hamon said Spanghero was one company in a chain that started with two Romanian slaughterhouses which say they clearly labeled their meat as horse.

The meat was then bought by a Cyprus-registered trader and sent to a warehouse in the Netherlands.

Spanghero bought the meat from the trader, then resold it to the French frozen food processor Comigel. The resulting food was marketed under Sweden-based Findus brand as lasagna and other products labeled as containing ground beef.

Hamon said Spanghero was well aware that the meat was mislabeled when it sold it to Comigel.

"Spanghero knew," Hamon said. "One thing that should have attracted Spanghero's attention? The price."

Hamon said the meat from Romania cost far below the market rate for beef.

A representative for Spanghero said company officials have been interrogated by authorities, who have raided Spanghero headquarters several times in recent days, but no one has been arrested.

The representative insisted the company acted "in good faith" and that it never knew the meat it bought and sold was horsemeat. The representative said he was not authorized to be publicly named according to his contract with Spanghero.

He wouldn't comment on French authorities' insistence that Spanghero should have recognized the meat as horse by its price, smell and color.

Food processor Comigel was not blameless either, Hamon said, declaring that the paperwork from Spanghero had significant irregularities, including a failure to specify country of origin.

"And once the meat was defrosted, we can ask ourselves why Comigel didn't notice that the color and odor was not that of beef?" Hamon said.

In other, separate developments:

— Police in Wales said two men — ages 64 and 42 — were arrested at Farmbox Meats near Aberystwyth, in Wales, while a 63-year-old man was arrested at the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.

— Britain's food regulator, meanwhile, said Thursday that six horse carcasses which tested positive for an equine painkiller may have entered the human food chain in France and that horsemeat tainted with the medicine may have been sold to consumers "for some time."

The U.K. Food Standards Agency said eight out of 206 horses it checked had tested positive for phenylbutazone, commonly known as bute. The drug is banned for human use in countries including Britain and the U.S.

Thousands of meat products are being tested for the drug, and for horse DNA, after horsemeat was found in food products labeled as beef across Europe.

Almost no horsemeat is consumed in Britain, where hippophagy — eating horses — is widely considered taboo. But thousands of horses killed in the country each year are exported for meat to countries including France and Belgium that have a culture of eating horsemeat.

The scandal has also raised the uncomfortable idea that Europeans may unwittingly have been consuming racehorses, which are often treated with bute.

Despite the ban on bute for humans, Britain's chief medical officer, Sally Davies, said that horsemeat containing the drug "presents a very low risk to human health."

Davies said the drug was once prescribed to patients with severe arthritis, and while it sometimes produced serious side effects including the blood disorder aplastic anemia, it was "extremely unlikely" that anyone eating horsemeat would experience them.

"If you ate 100-percent horse burgers of 250 grams (8.8 ounces), you would have to eat, in one day, more than 500 or 600 to get to a human dose," she said. "It would really be difficult to get up to a human dose."

Peter Lees, emeritus professor of veterinary pharmacology at the Royal Veterinary College, agreed there was little risk of harm from eating horsemeat. He said even the worst-case scenario involved a tiny amount of bute in a small percentage of meat samples.

A "horse passport" system, which records whether animals have been treated with bute, is meant to stop the drug entering the human food chain.

On Thursday, Britain's Aintree race track said a slaughterhouse in northern England shut down this week by government investigators had a contract to dispose of fatally injured racehorses.

The racecourse said it was "as confident as we possibly can be" that none of the meat had entered the human food chain.