Food inspection bans suspicious rum from shops

Zlin, South Moravia, Oct 17 (CTK) - The Czech Agriculture and Food Inspection Authority has banned the sales of cheap rum, labelled "Original tuzemak" and produced by the Drak company, as of Thursday after tests proved that bottles of this alcohol were poisonous, its spokesman Pavel Kopriva told CTK yesterday.

Kopriva said this cheap rum should not be distributed to retail businesses at all, but that customers should be careful because the distributors tended not to observe laws and regulations. It therefore cannot be ruled out that these dangerous spirits might get to some shops, he added.

He also warned against any bottle of Original tuzemak from the Likerka Drak liquor maker produced this year.

The food inspectors have recently uncovered 7600 bottles of the cheap rum with Likerka Drak labels containing 50 percent of methanol, which is a deadly concentration. The bottles with the tainted alcohol were prepared for distribution to Czech shops in a Zlin storage area of the Verdana company, which is the exclusive distributor of Likerka Drak in the Czech Republic.

Kopriva said on Tuesday the poisonous alcohol might have killed thousands of people.

On Tuesday, the police arrested Likerka Drak's head Pavel Caniga. Caniga is suspected of endangering public health.

The police have launched a hunt for Verdana's head Robert Sedlarik.