MOSCOW  - Russia said Wednesday it had found horsemeat in a shipment of sausages imported from Austria in its first known case of horsemeat contamination as the scandal spread further across Europe. “Tests on a shipment of Frankfurter sausages found the DNA of horses, chicken, cattle and soya,” Russia’s agricultural watchdog said in a statement. Photographs published on the website of the agricultural watchdog showed the plastic-packed sausages labelled “Frankfurter”, with the producer named as Landhof in Linz and the importer named as a Moscow-based company. Unlike the cases of contaminated meat elsewhere in Europe, the sausages were labelled not as pure beef but as containing only pork.
The sausages “came two days ago from Austria,” Alexei Alexeyenko, an aide to the watchdog’s chief, told AFP. “The shipment is over 20 tonnes,” he said, adding that the enterprise that supplied the meat had been struck off the list of suppliers to Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The sausages were labelled as produced on February 11 and said to contain 80 per cent pork as well as other non-meat ingredients.