French police in BSE government raid


French families want charges brought against UK officials for BSE deaths

PARIS, France -- Police have raided offices of French government ministries and seized documents as part of a possible manslaughter inquiry into the BSE outbreak.

Charges of manslaughter have been levelled against officials by families of victims of the fatal human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).

Two people have died of vCJD in France and a third is suspected of suffering from the disease, which scientists have linked to eating contaminated beef.

Judicial sources said prosecutors, accompanied by the police, removed documents from the agriculture, health and finance ministries.

Prosecutors are investigating the official handling of BSE, or mad cow disease, during the late 1980s and 1990s after families of victims filed manslaughter charges against "persons unknown" in December.

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The Paris prosecutor's office said at the time it was considering bringing charges.

The families want formal charges brought against British and European officials for allowing Britain to export suspect animal feed -- which scientists have linked to BSE -- after banning it at home in 1989.

They also want charges brought against French officials for not taking action to stop it. The families allege EU officials did nothing to stop the exports of feed from Britain as they did not want to delay the 1992 opening of European borders in their drive for a single market, and that France went along with this in order to protect its own meat industry.

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Several lawsuits linked to the BSE crisis have been filed in Britain, but they focus on charges of negligence rather than manslaughter, a charge more serious and more difficult to prove.

The French lawsuits deal with the death of a 27-year-old man in 1996, a women, 36, who died last February and a 19-year-old man in the terminal stages of suspected vCJD.

At least 80 people have died from the human form of mad cow disease in Britain.

Britain's beef industry was decimated in the mid-1990s when the EU slapped a ban on exports amid fears over BSE. It is still struggling to recover years after the ban was lifted.

Concern over the spread of mad cow disease has sparked consumer panic in France and elsewhere in Europe.


Cows are being stacked in mounds before being disposed of

The French government has banned meat and bone meal in animal feed, taken T-bone steaks off restaurant menus and instituted a sweeping programme of cattle testing. Many schools have banned beef from their cafeterias.

The latest scare broke out in October when three French supermarket chains removed beef from their shelves over fears it might have come from herds where a contaminated cow was found.

In 1999, French judges convicted a former health minister of manslaughter in a scandal over infections from HIV-tainted blood. The prosecution's case was then based on extensive records on blood transfusions and the government's role in allowing tainted blood supplies to be used.

Reuters contributed to this report.