DUBLIN (Reuters) - The Irish company at the centre of a scandal in Europe over horsemeat in beef products, said on Thursday it is leaving the frozen burger market after selling the factory where burgers containing horse DNA were first discovered. The scandal, which has damaged confidence in parts of the industry and hit sales of processed ready-meals, erupted in January when inspectors found beef burgers produced by Irish company ABP Foods on the shelves of Tesco contained 29 percent horse meat.

Thousands of DNA tests on beef products across the European Union found up to 5.0 percent of horsemeat in beef products, the European Commission said Tuesday. The EU on February 15 ordered 2,250 DNA tests on prepared meals said to contain beef in the wake of a horsemeat scandal that hugely undermined consumer confidence in the food industry. It also ordered tests in horse carcasses for the potentially harmful horse drug phenylbutazone, or bute, which is banned from the human food chain.

The Dutch food and consumer watchdog on Tuesday raided a southern trader suspected of horsemeat fraud as part of an official investigation into Europe's tainted beef scandal, the public prosecutor said. Officials confiscated documents from the business based in Breda, named by Dutch media as the Windmeijer Meat Trading company, prosecutors said, adding that a second Cypriot-based company which reports identified as Draap Trading, was also suspected of fraud.

LONDON, March 1 (Reuters) - The latest round of testing by Britain's grocers for horsemeat in beef products has produced no new positive results, industry body the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said on Friday. "All the UK's largest supermarkets, and a number of other BRC member food businesses, have now completed 100 percent of their tests on processed minced beef products," it said. "Today they are reporting the results of 361 more tests on 103 products, received over the last week. They have produced no new positive results."