Employees from a Chinese dairy company have been taken into police custody on suspicion of selling tonnes of melamine-tainted milk powder.

Three people from the Shaanxi Jinqiao Dairy Co, in northern Shaanxi province, have been detained and accused of producing and selling toxic food, Chinese state media reported yesterday.

The police operation comes just over a year after a nationwide contamination scandal involving the lacing of milk powder with the industrial chemical killed six and sickened an estimated 300,000.

The general manager and two employees of the dairy company have been accused of selling more than five tonnes of contaminated milk powder to a food additive firm in the southern region of Guangxi in September. The Nanning Yueqian food additive company uncovered the contamination last month, leading to the detentions on 2 December.

Xu Qiang, deputy head of the regional public security department, said that none of the product had reached the market and all of it had been recovered.

Source: FoodProduction.com