Riot police in the Netherlands yesterday clashed with around 100 farmers who were trying to stop officials slaughtering healthy animals.
The clashes were in the central town of Kootwijkerbroek, the Dutch ANP news agency reported. Police made arrests after 40 protesters set fire to roadblocks and hung carcasses of a pig and two calves on street signs, ANP said.
The situation in Kootwijkerbroek has been tense since the virus was confirmed there a few weeks ago, and farmers have protested violently against the preventive slaughter of all cattle within a one-mile radius of the infected site.
By yesterday 25 Dutch farms were infected. Most cases, except two unexplained ones in the north, had been traced to a shipment of cattle from Ireland that had gone through Britain.
The Netherlands is the worst hit continental country and the foot-and-mouth crisis looks set to get worse. Previously unaffected areas in northern Friesland are the latest to report new cases, which "are very worrying since, contrary to those in the east of the country, we do not know how the virus spread there," Mr Ruud Huirne, a professor at the agricultural university at Wageningen, said.