- A 39-year-old man has been arrested in Austria for his alleged involvement in an attempt to blackmail a German baby food manufacturer.
Austrian police have detained a 39-year-old man in connection with an attempted blackmail case involving contaminated baby food produced by the German brand HiPP.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Eisenstadt confirmed the arrest, according to Germany’s DPA news agency.
The authorities said the suspect was taken into custody in the Austrian state of Burgenland, although earlier reports by Kronen Zeitung suggested he had been arrested in Salzburg.
Officials later clarified that he is being held in Austria and is currently under interrogation, while his identity remains undisclosed due to ongoing investigations.
The case centers on an attempted extortion plot in which an unidentified individual allegedly demanded money from HiPP after contaminating its baby food products with rat poison.
Investigators revealed that last month, five tampered jars were recovered before reaching consumers in Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. As a precaution, the company issued a product recall in Austria, dw.com reports.
German authorities became involved because the affected products were manufactured in Germany. In one confirmed case, Austrian investigators detected 15 micrograms of rat poison in a 190-gram jar labeled “carrots with potatoes,” which had been purchased at a Spar supermarket in Eisenstadt. The exact type of poison has not been publicly disclosed.
Officials are continuing to search for a second potentially contaminated jar within Austria, although HiPP has stated that its product range in Germany remains unaffected.
According to reports by Die Presse, the company received an email in March demanding €2 million within six days. However, the message went unnoticed until two weeks after the deadline, as it had been sent to a rarely monitored group email address.
HiPP, a family-owned company with more than 120 years of history, is headquartered in Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm in Bavaria, Germany, while its parent company, HiPP Holding AG, is based in Sachseln, Switzerland.
