Kebab meat sold by Norwegian group Kuraas
to restaurants contained between five and 30 percent pork even though it
was marked as halal, the agency found.
"We will
file a complaint against the producer," Catherine Signe Svinland, an
adviser at the food safety watchdog, told AFP.
"In a
halal product, there should be no pork at all and when we find
such quantities ... we don't believe it's an accident but it is in fact
fraud," she said.
The group
denied it had intended to mislead customers.
"We buy
huge quantities of halal meat and we can show invoices corresponding to
what we bought and sold," marketing manager Kenneth Kuraas told news
agency NTB.
"Pork
ending up in these products is simply due to routines not
being followed," he added.
Kuraas later
explained that a labeling error may have been to blame.
"Our
theory is that it happened when the meat was labeled," he said.
Since pork
consumption is prohibited under Islam, the Kuraas company sent a letter of
apology to the Islamic Council, an umbrella organisation representing
Muslims in Norway.
The Islamic
halal method of killing an animal requires its throat to be slit and the
blood to be drained.
On Thursday
halal chicken sausages served to pupils in central London schools and
nurseries were revealed to contain traces of pork.
European
countries have stepped up food controls in response to the recent scandal
which saw millions of frozen ready meals pulled off supermarket shelves
after tests showed meat labelled as beef contained large quantities
of horsemeat.
Source: The Local/AFP
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