Germany starts to slaughter its pigs as dioxin scare worsens

Hundreds of pigs were today being slaughtered in Germany as the country's poisoned animal feed scandal worsened.

What began as a poison egg scare has now spread to chickens and pigs, government officials said.

Investigators are reporting raised levels of cancer-causing dioxin in pigs at a farm in Lower Saxony.

The suspicion was that their feed was tainted by the same chemicals supplied by the firm Harles und Jentzsch that poisoned eggs which entered the UK food chain in the form of mayonnaise, quiches, cakes and other supermarket products.

The pigs are now being slaughtered and their carcasses will be burned.

The Food Standards Agency could not confirm whether pork from the farm had entered the UK food chain.

"This is an ongoing incident which we are monitoring closely," a spokesman said.

The latest scare follows an admission on Sunday that chickens had also been contaminated.

Last week, German authorities froze sales of poultry, pork and eggs from thousands of farms.

On Friday it was revealed that liquid egg processed from 130,000 suspect eggs moved from the Netherlands into British supermarkets.