A criminal network created fake horse passports and duplicate microchips to traffic hundreds of animals across Europe, police officials said on Friday, describing a system of animal identity fraud that led horses to slaughter.
Over two days and two dozen searches, the police in Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands checked more than 1,000 horses that may have been fraudulently traded, officials said. The traffickers’ goal, the police said, was to misidentify horses to sell them at different rates — moves such as selling sporting horses to slaughterhouses and presenting older horses as younger and more valuable.
“Investigators suspect that forged horse passports and manipulated microchips were used to effectively give animals new identities,” Europol, the European law enforcement agency, said in a statement.
In an operation across four countries, the police seized “a significant number of horses,” along with 100,000 euros (about $116,000) in cash, the Belgian Federal Police said.
In Belgium, at least two people were arrested. Those arrested were not identified. The Irish, French and Dutch police did not say whether they had made arrests.
Officials said the investigation continued, including efforts to find other people who may have been involved.
The investigation began in Belgium, when the police and prosecutors got a tip about wrongdoing in the international horse trade, Belgium’s Federal Police said in a statement. Investigators identified a horse trader in East Flanders as central to a fraudulent network that stretched to France, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Criminals forged fake passports for the animals to move them across borders, the police said. They also created duplicate microchips to get around a tracing system designed for the animals’ welfare. The police declined to provide detail on how traffickers manipulated microchips or forged documents.
The European Union and other territories use animal passports, usually for pets or sporting animals, as a legal form of identification that also carries the guarantee that the animal has been microchipped, vaccinated and certified fit to travel.
The criminal network passed off horses bred for sport as livestock for food production, the Belgian police said. A large number of these horses, which had received medication as they were trained for sporting roles, were sent from Ireland to continental Europe, where some ended up in the slaughterhouse, the police said.
Through the fraudulent documentation, a horse could be classified as an animal “without value,” allowing traffickers to reclassify it as headed to slaughter for roughly €1,000 to €1,500 per horse.
In some cases, a spokeswoman for the Belgian police said, older horses were presented as younger to fetch a higher price.
This week, the police in Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands fanned out into 24 separate searches, inspecting more than 1,000 horses, according to Europol and the Belgian police. Europol coordinated the sting operation, which food safety inspectors joined.
The European Union has a strict set of rules for the human trade and slaughter of horses. There are horses bred for slaughter in Europe, but surplus horses are also sometimes slaughtered for horse-meat products, according to World Horse Welfare, a nongovernmental organization.
In 2013, a scandal erupted across Britain, France and the Netherlands after officials discovered horse meat products disguised as more expensive beef in frozen foods. At the time, French officials blamed a Romanian slaughterhouse, but Romanian officials said that while the country exported tons of horse meat a year, they had found no evidence of fraudulent packaging.
An Berger, a spokeswoman for the Belgian Federal Police, said in an email about the current case, “International fraud requires international cooperation among law enforcement agencies, and that is precisely what happened in this investigation.”
“The abuse of hundreds of horses to generate criminal profits — and thereby jeopardize food safety — must be addressed,” she added.
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