CHINA: Chinese authorities held the boss of a fast-food restaurant for questioning yesterday as they investigated a food-poisoning outbreak that state media said had killed 41 people and put hundreds more in hospital.
Locals in Tangshan, a small industrial town near the eastern city of Nanjing, estimated that more than 100 people had died after eating breakfast snacks, including sesame cakes and fried dough sticks, at a branch of the Heshengyuan Soy Milk chain.
The Communist Party's central committee and the cabinet sent a team of police and health officials to investigate, state media said, highlighting concerns about bad publicity in the run-up to a leadership change.
Mr Peng Yongqing, who owns a shop next to the now-closed outlet, said he saw an elderly man collapse after eating breakfast there on Saturday.
"One minute he was sitting there eating and the next he stood up and keeled over." The man died on the way to hospital.
As a motorcade carrying plainclothes and uniformed police sped around the normally quiet town of a few thousand people, rumours about the poisoning swirled, with some saying they suspected foul play.
Others said they saw victims bleeding at the mouth and ears.
The official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday that 400 people, many of them construction workers and schoolchildren, were poisoned and 41 had died. But later, without explanation, it reverted to an earlier story, saying only that "a number of victims" had died and more than 200 were poisoned.
Tangshan residents said the source of the poisoning was more likely to be a stall in an alley opposite which made the breakfast snacks and delivered them to Heshengyuan each morning.
Police cordoned off the dark alley and a police motorcade arrived to inspect it yesterday. - (Reuters)