A real criminal circuit dedicated to the clandestine slaughter of horses was defeated by the Carabinieri of the NAS of Ragusa as part of an investigation coordinated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Syracuse. The operation, conducted with the support of the provincial commands of Syracuse and Ragusa, led to the execution of 7 personal precautionary measures and a preventive seizure decree of assets estimated at approximately 2 million euros. At the center of the illicit system were horses formally registered as not intended for the production of food for human consumption, purchased at advantageous prices and illegally entered into the food supply chain.
The processing of the carcasses took place inside a dilapidated rural farmhouse, belonging to a local livestock farm, totally lacking the minimum hygienic-sanitary requirements. The products obtained, potentially dangerous for public health, were subsequently sold at competitive prices through a butcher’s shop and various itinerant sandwich shop businesses present in various municipalities in the Syracuse province, deceiving consumers and flouting all food safety regulations.
Falsification of documents and the involvement of a veterinarian
The system was based on a precise division of tasks and on a network of unsuspected complicities. Inside a regular slaughterhouse in the province, illicit operations were systematically hidden through the falsification of documents accompanying the animals. According to the investigators, such fraudulent conduct would have been facilitated by the conscious complicity of the owners of the facility and of an official veterinary doctor on duty at the ASP of Syracuse, recipient of the house arrest measure.
The investigation also brought to light serious environmental damage linked to the management of processing by-products. Slaughter waste was in fact abandoned and systematically accumulated on land adjacent to an important motorway axis in the province, giving rise to illegal landfills of special waste and reducing management costs to maximize illicit profits. The judicial authority thus ordered the preventive seizure of the organisation’s key structures, including a slaughterhouse, a stable, a butcher’s shop and the area used as a landfill, recalling that the principle of presumption of innocence applies to all suspects until a final sentence is reached.
