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Today it is exactly one year since the government decided to kill 15 million mink in Denmark.
Tonight, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (Social Democrats) had to stand up for a united press corps.
What was supposed to be a measure to stop the spread of covid-19 from mink to mink and perhaps to humans, has developed into a political nightmare for the Prime Minister.
In particular, there has been outright criticism of the government because many text messages between the Prime Minister and other top people in the system have been deleted.
Must retrieve the SMS
Tonight it was revealed that Mette Frederiksen’s telephones had a function that meant that the messages were automatically deleted.
– It happened before the killing of the mink and before the Mink Commission started its work, Frederiksen said at a press conference on Wednesday night.
The critics believe that the text messages may contain evidence that the government knew that the slaughter of mink was in violation of the law. But the prime minister claims that is not the case.
But despite this, she now crawls to the cross and has embarked on an extensive work where technicians will try to recreate what she has written.
– Will the text messages show that we write to each other in direct language? Yes, they will. This is how it is when we are in a crucial crisis, says Mette Frederiksen.
Meiner it made sense
Last year, a commission was set up to get to the bottom of who was responsible for ordering the killing of 15 million mink.
She completely rejects that they do not want to show any knowledge of what could and could not be done to the mink.
– I am completely calm in the work of the High Mink Commission. I stand for the decisions I have made, said Frederiksen.
She also claimed that she received advice from the head of the ministry, Barbara Bertelsen, to delete the text messages automatically.
– I think it made sense, said the Prime Minister.
But it was a marked Frederiksen who met the press on Wednesday night. She also had to regret that the government in general has been reluctant to send over documents to the commission investigating the illegal killing of millions of mink.
– We wanted to be sure that the Mink Commission received the right information, she said.
GAS MINK: The government used gas to kill 15 million mink in Denmark.
Photo: MORTEN STRICKER / AFP
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Illegal slaughter
In November 2020, professionals and politicians in Denmark feared that corona-infected mink would spread the infection further.
But after all the mink had been slaughtered and buried in Denmark, it emerged after a quarter of an hour that the government was not allowed to make any decision to kill fresh mink.
This led to the Minister of Food and Agriculture Mogens Jensen withdrew.
It seemed after a quarter of an hour that the head of department in the Ministry of the Environment and Food, Tejs Binderup, knew that it was illegal to kill Denmark’s mink population, before it happened.
But the top bureaucrat did not inform the political leadership about this and later he has said that the politicians on their own initiative should have checked this.
– If the government thought that this was the right way to go, they must establish relevant legislative work before they make the decision, Binderup said.
NRK visited a farm in Kolding in Denmark in November 2020. Many mink were killed here.
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Others have not deleted
Former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen has said that he did not delete text messages when he was Prime Minister, writes Danmarks Radio.
They also say that neither the Minister of Justice nor the Minister of Defense delete their messages, so it is not a widespread practice in the ministries that otherwise handle confidential information, writes DR.
Another question is whether the deleted text messages can be retrieved again.
According to an expert, the police can, with a special method that the police and insurance companies have access to, apparently correct the deleted text messages.
– It is clear that the longer it takes from the time they were deleted to actually do this survey, the more likely it is that data has been lost, Jan Kaastrup, partner in the insurance company CSIS, has previously told DR.
Denmark: Certain mass slaughter was illegal
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