BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — A maze of trading between meat wholesalers has made it increasingly difficult to trace the origins of food — enabling horse meat disguised as beef to be sold in frozen meals across Europe.

Finger-pointing has grown by the day, involving more countries and more companies. Yesterday, Romanian officials scrambled to defend two plants implicated in the scandal, saying the meat was properly declared and any fraud was committed elsewhere.

France says Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horse meat being labelled as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagna, moussaka and the French equivalent of Shepherd’s Pie. The affair started earlier this year with worries about horse meat in burgers in Ireland and Britain.

British grocery chain Tesco said yesterday that tests showed some samples of its frozen spaghetti meal contained more than 60 per cent horse DNA.

Horse meat is largely taboo in Britain and some other countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized by some connoisseurs. Authorities aren’t worried about health effects, but it has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers misleading the public.

France’s agricultural minister said yesterday that regulators must find a way “out of the fog”.

One of the Romanian slaughterhouses implicated, Carmolimp, said in a statement its meat was properly labelled as horse meat, adding that it had not exported beef in 2012.

It called attempts to blame it for the scandal ”shameful,” suggesting that only an incompetent French meat processor would mistake the horse meat for beef.

Romania has some 25 horse meat slaughterhouses and exports horse meat to Cyprus, France, Poland, and the Netherlands, often through middlemen, officials said.

In deeply rural Romania, horses are sold from individual households to abattoirs, and each animal has four sets of documents before its meat

is exported.

Romanian authorities stopped short of confirming that the two slaughterhouses were the source of the horse meat. But they said they checked paperwork that shows they were not improperly mislabelling meat before it was shipped out of the country to middlemen.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta said Monday there were no direct contracts between the Romanian plants and French companies and that the meat would have been mislabelled somewhere else along the line.

“We can now ask that the guilty parties are sanctioned as fast and firmly as possible,” he said. “I want to help catch and punish the guilty ones… .. We are victims of this fraud.”

An initial investigation by French safety authorities determined that French company Poujol bought frozen meat from a Cypriot trader. That trader had received it from a Dutch food trader, and that Dutch company had received the meat from two Romanian slaughterhouses.

In Bucharest, Agriculture Minister Daniel Constantin said agriculture ministers from Britain, France and Romania will meet in Brussels at the end of the week to discuss the scandal.

Swedish officials were meeting yesterday with executives from the biggest supermarket chains to get an overview of how widespread the fraud is, while in Paris top French government officials and meat producers were gathering to get a handle on the crisis, which has snared a French food processing company, Comigel.

The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority also said Monday it was launching an investigation into the horse meat scandal.

Re-tracing the path of the misllabeled meat will take time. Processed foods, unlike fresh, do not need to be labelled by their countries of origin in Europe. And typical frozen meals like the ones being pulled from supermarket shelves across Europe can have more than a dozen ingredients from all over.

French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said the results of the French investigation into the horse meat fraud would be released Wednesday.

No one has reported health risks from the mislabelled meat. But clearly some company in the food chain benefited from selling the much cheaper horse meat as beef.