Four investigators have been drafted in by the North's Department of Agriculture to investigate how the illegal sheep trade brought foot-and-mouth disease into the North, it emerged today.
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Investigators hope to ascertain how the illegal sheep trade brought foot-and-mouth into the North.
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Stormont Agriculture Minister Ms Bríd Rodgers confirmed four people have been employed part-time to help officials investigate the disease outbreak.
But in a written reply to a question in the Northern Ireland Assembly the Minister would notconfirm whether the investigators were former RUC officers.
Ms Rodgers was asked by Democratic Unionist Mr Ian Paisley Jr how many current police officers were involved in her Department's efforts to tackle the disease and how many former RUC officers were operating from her Department.
It is understood four former police officers have been helping the Department to investigate a number of livestock dealers who imported sheep from Carlisle in Wales into the North before the first outbreak in Meigh in south Armagh on the Border in March.
The dealers are believed to have brought the animals into the North on the grounds they were being slaughtered in a meat plant but that they distributed some of them instead to farms.
PA