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Dumped turkey waste, offcuts and a telltale label provided the evidence that allowed investigators to link the outbreak of bird flu at the Bernard Matthews farm in Suffolk and the company's business in Hungary.
The revelations came as Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw said the company could face prosecution for a "biosecurity breach" at the plant in the village of Holton.
Investigators believe the virus got into turkey sheds at the farm from offcuts and waste from the imported meat, which was processed at the site. They add that a label found at the plant suggests that the company was "economical with the truth" about how close its Hungarian operations were to an eruption of the disease in the country last month. The company denies this.
The two discoveries have led ministers to abandon their earlier conviction that the virus was brought to the farm by wild birds, and underlined an international reappraisal of the role of factory farming and the poultry trade in the worldwide spread of the disease.
David Nabarro, the UN co-ordinator for avian and human flu, said the trade was behind the spread of the virus this year.
The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) admitted yesterday that it had known, since long before the crisis that the Bernard Matthews plant regularly imported turkey meat from Hungary, where the disease broke out on a goose farm in the town of Szentes, in the south of the country.
Yet ministers and officials attending a crisis meeting of the Cobra emergency committee were convinced that the disease had been carried to the farm by at least one of the gulls that habitually throng the site.
But by Thursday morning ministers were rapidly revising their position. Their change of mind began when blood tests indicated that the strain of H5N1 found in Suffolk was identical to the one that had caused the Hungarian outbreak.
The result, which is expected to be confirmed by more tests today, pointed to a direct connection; had the virus been carried from Hungary to Britain by a wild bird it would have mutated slightly on the way.
The first smoking gun came when investigators found that the turkey waste and offcuts from the Hungarian meat had been placed in what they call a "near open" skip. They believe that gulls or rats may have picked up the infection from these, enabling the virus to get into the turkey sheds.
"The waste and offcuts were not very well treated in biosecurity terms," said one investigator.
But it remains a mystery how, if the meat was infected, it had become so in the first place. It seemed improbable, as the company kept repeating, that the meat had been imported from its plant in Sarvar, north-west Hungary, some 160 miles away from the outbreak on the goose farm.
But then a Defra investigator spotted a label that linked the meat to an abattoir at the town of Kecskemet, 30 miles away from the farm. Investigators are now looking into whether it was contaminated there by other meat from the infected area.
They stress that Bernard Matthews will have done nothing illegal in using the abattoir. But they accuse the company of being "economical with the truth" in not telling Defra about it earlier.
The inquiry is also focusing on how the virus spread on the Suffolk farm, and it is here that evidence might be found which could lead to a prosecution of the company. Compassion in World Farming yesterday published a report which concluded that factory farming was "creating highly virulent avian flu strains". It added: "We factor in the frequent flow of goods within and between countries. The potential for disease spread is high."
- INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
