Food poisoning: Man admits he used rat poison

Tangshan residents were shocked to see customers at the tiny Heshengyuan Soy Milk chain store collapse, some bleeding from the mouth and ears, after eating fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and sticky rice balls there on Saturday morning.

Police seized Chen on Sunday in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, hundreds of kilometres from Tangshan, State Television said.

It gave no further details about the man. But Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po said he was a cousin of the restaurant owner and had opened a rival but less successful business in Tangshan, just outside Nanjing city.

Chen put poison in the rival eatery’s water supply and noodles hoping to give breakfast-eaters stomach trouble, it said. When he saw people dying, Chen fled and boarded a train to Henan where he was picked up by police, it said.

However, there was still some confusion about the official version of events. A Zhengzhou police official confirmed a man was caught on a train there but said he was only one of several suspects. ‘‘We cannot say he was responsible for the poisoning. There could be many other suspects, as in an assassination case,’’ he said.

There was confusion too over CCTV’s death toll of 38. A report on the website of the official Xinhua news agency on Saturday said 41 had died. It quickly disappeared and subsequent reports said only that several people were dead.