Painkillers Found in Tesco Ice Cream, Police Suggest Act Deliberate

Spiked ice cream is fun for responsible adults, but not when your dessert is dosed with unannounced painkillers.

According to The Telegraph, Tesco ice cream have been sabotaged with pain relief tablets. Police believe the treats were deliberately tampered with. The United Kingdom supermarket recalled its own brand of Chocolate and Nut Ice Cream Cones after the pain relief pills were found in two corns in November.

North Yorkshire Police's major crime unit stated the supermarket's supplier is R&R Ice Cream's factory, the largest manufacturers and distributors of ice-cream in Europe. Detective Superintendent Dai Malyn said his "gut instinct is that it was a deliberate contamination."

"It is a challenging investigation, because what we have got to try and identify was how and where and who was responsible for that contamination, and was it deliberate contamination," Malyn said. "If it was felt to be accidental from the outset, the resources we have put into it probably wouldn't be to the scale we have done."

Peter Pickthall, R&R's human resources director, said it's impossible for someone to have added that tablets while in the Tesco stores.

"It is two separate parts of the country so that has focused the police on the fact that it could be a potentially malicious act, perhaps by someone in the factory," Pickthall said, according to the Telegraph.  "From our point of view, if there is evidence of anything where there is potential for a consumer to be injured in any way we need to find out how it happened.

Pickthall added: "If it is something like a tablet, which cannot have been accidentally put into the product, it needs to be investigated to try and find the culprit."

The Telegraph reported that police have not made any arrest.

"As a precautionary measure, we issued a product recall on Tesco Chocolate and Nut Ice Cream Cones in November, after two individual cones were found to contain tablets," a Tesco spokeswoman said. "We are currently investigating this incident with our supplier and we are helping the police with their enquiries."

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