Thirty tons of melamine-tainted milk powder that were hidden during the 2008 scandal has resurfaced in a village in Shanxi Province, the Legal Weekly reported Wednesday.
The report said that an owner of a refrigerated warehouse surnamed Sun learned that 30 tons of the polluted milk powder were stored at his warehouse in February 2009. Sun allowed Shanxi Yashili Dairy Company to use his facility.
The country was shocked after six infants were killed and 300,000 others were sickened by the tainted powder in 2008. Authorities have demanded that all questionable milk powder produced before September 14, 2008 be destroyed.
"About seven or eight people from the company repackaged those milk powder inside the warehouse," Sun said.
The report quoted a source close to the company as saying that they repacked the polluted milk powder to sell as new.
The company said in a statement that they have not repacked tainted milk powder.
In August, the Xinhua Newes Agency reported that 103 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder were seized in Hebei, Shanxi and Tianjin, a month after food safety authorities seized 64 tons of raw dairy materials containing 500 times the acceptable level of toxic melamine in a dairy plant in Qinghai Province.
Wang Dingmian, former director of the Dairy Association of China, said earlier that the problem lies in the fact that no one knows how much tainted diary products eluded authorities after the widely publicized crackdown in 2008.
Wang estimated in February that there was at least 100,000 tons of toxic milk still circulating in the market.
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