For three years, a butcher in Zurich, the largest city in Switzerland, deceived his Muslim customers by selling them pork falsely presented as calf.
The butcher has reportedly sold 3.1 tons of pork making his customers believe that the meat is Halal, according to the Swiss version of 20Minutes, which revealed this scandal.
In a routine control of food security, an inspector noticed that the meat presented for sale didn’t look like calf, as the tag claimed.
The manager of the butchery was sentenced to 6 months in jail and a fine 18,000 Swiss francs (about $18,680) “for fraud and misrepresentation.”
“If customers had known it was pork, they would not have bought it because Islam forbids the consumption of this type of meat,” says the prosecutor handling the case.
The butcher was deceiving his customers double fold. On the one hand, Muslims who were buying meat at his shop did not know it was pork, which is forbidden according to the teachings of Islam. On the other hand, he made substantial profits, since pork is much cheaper than the calf on the meat market.