UP to 50,000 missing horses across Europe probably ended up in the 2013 horsemeat scandal, a leading Belfast-based food safety expert has claimed.

Professor Chris Elliott, who is Director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, issued the warning at the recent Fighting Food Fraud conference in Doncaster, hosted by Highfield Awarding Body for Compliance (HABC), one of Britain’s leading exam boards.