Mum tells of horror at finding blade in baby’s food ‘put there by farmer’
A MOTHER told a court how she came within millimetres of feeding her son a craft knife blade planted in a jar of baby food.
Morven Smith spotted the metal shard after passing her 10-monthold son a few spoonfuls of the Heinz sweet and sour chicken.
Her husband then found a second shard in the jar, the Old Bailey heard.
Mrs Smith, of Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, told jurors in a statement: “It was horrendous. I felt sick I was so shocked.”
Prosecutors say Nigel Wright, 45, spiked baby food jars in a campaign lasting nearly two years to extort bitcoin worth £1.4million from Tesco.
The farmer sent the chain dozens of letters between May 2018 and this February, offering to say where the tainted products were in exchange for cryptocurrency, the court heard.
He signed his letters “Guy Brush and the Dairy Pirates” and claimed to be part of a cohort of dairy farmers underpaid by Tesco, it was said.
Tesco issued a national product recall of Heinz baby food and alerted its Clubcard customers.
It prompted Harpreet Kaur-Singh to contact Tesco to tell them she had found shards of metal in a jar of Heinz Sunday chicken dinner and another of cheesy pasta stars.
Following the recall, 42,000 jars of Heinz baby food were recovered but only the three were found to have been contaminated.
Further letters to Tesco from Wright relating to Cow and Gate baby food resulted in 140,000 units of its products being withdrawn from Tesco shelves, the jury was told.
Wright, of Market Rasen, Lincs, denies two charges of contaminating goods and three counts of blackmail against Tesco. He is also charged with blackmail for allegedly demanding £150,000 worth of bitcoin from a driver with whom he had a road-rage clash.
Wright admits some parts of the campaign but claims he was forced to do so by travellers who threatened to kill him unless he gave them £1million, the court heard.
He denies planting the shards of metal in baby food found in Tesco’s Rochdale branch but accepts putting a contaminated jar on the shelf in the Lockerbie store.
The trial, expected to last three weeks, continues.