Wholesalers from the Tejgaon Poultry wholesale market, the largest in the city, revealed that unidentified persons collected dead fowl yesterday and sold it to an unknown group of buyers.

They added that such transactions occur almost daily and have taken place for the last several years.

"Everyday they come and collect the dead fowl. They collected more than a hundred chickens yesterday also," said Md. Nabi Hossain, a wholesale poultry trader from Tejgaon.

The wholesalers estimated that, as hundreds of cages of fowls arrive to the city everyday to meet the growing demand of the capital, nearly a thousand chickens die everyday.

"For the last six to seven years people have been collecting and selling those," said Nabi Hossain, who has been engaged with the poultry business for last the 40 years.

Public concern about the quality of restaurant food has grown since Monday's arrest of a man with 53 dead chickens in Mirpur. The arrestee, Azad, later admitted under police interrogation that he and many others regularly supply dead chickens to various restaurants in Mirpur and Pallabi.

Posing as a catfish farm owner, this correspondent visited different poultry markets in the city yesterday and asked for dead chickens, explaining that rotten chicken is a popular feed for the catfish. It came to be known that the demand for dead hens is very high and that some people continue to collect the discarded fowl.

"If you come early in the morning, you will get dead fowl. Everyday at least two hundred dead birds have been supplied from the Tejgaon market," said one trader from Tejgaon.

When asked what buyers do with the dead birds, another wholesaler replied, "We do not know what they do with those birds. We just throw it away and some people collect them in the night and sell them in the morning at Tk 30 a piece."

An officer from the Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) said that, in an effort to stop this practice, poultry sellers will be instructed that they must take care to dump the dead fowl.

"Following the published news, my authority directed me to take the necessary steps and soon I will issue letters to the food inspectors," said Foyez Ahmed Khan, Food and Sanitary inspector of the DCC.

Foyez also said food inspectors do not have any technology to ascertain whether restaurant owners have cooked the meat of dead birds.

"We just smell the food and check out the environment of the kitchen. If things are not satisfactory, we can file a case, for which the punishment is only three months vigorous jail time and Tk 200 imposed as a fine under the 'East Pakistan Pure Food Ordinance-1959," said Foyez Ahmed Khan.

He also expressed his realization that a new, stricter law needs to be issued, as well as strict standards to use as a benchmark when evaluating the quality of food.