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No legal basis: dead minks on a farm in southern Jutland (archive photo)
Photo: Mette Moerk / dpa
The controversial mass killing of breeding malts around a year ago is causing renewed trouble for Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen: A commission set up to investigate the events tried in vain to receive text messages from Frederiksen in connection with the illegal culling.
On the advice of her office, however, all SMS were automatically deleted after 30 days, Frederiksen told TV2 on Thursday.
Opposition calls for a police investigation
The process raised questions.
Frederiksen's predecessor Lars Løkke Rasmussen assured that his phone was never set to automatically delete SMS.
The Ministry of Justice made a similar statement on behalf of Head of Office Nick Haekkerup.
The opposition asked the Justice Minister to initiate a police investigation and have the deleted messages restored.
The Danish government announced last November that it would kill all 15 to 17 million farmed ores.
This was to prevent the spread of a mutated and human-transmittable form of Sars-CoV-2, which was feared that it could affect the effectiveness of future vaccines.
As it later turned out, there was no legal basis for the measure.
This was only created in retrospect.
The Mink Commission is now to examine in detail how the government has dealt with the problem.
Frederiksen is due to testify on December 9th.
kfr / AFP