British supermarket chain Tesco apologized on Tuesday for the "upset" caused when someone dumped ripped open ham products in the kosher section of one of its stores.
A woman took to Twitter to alert the retail chain about what had happened at the Barkingside store, posting a picture of the offending items, reported The Jewish Chronicle.
"So someone in my local Tesco saw fit to dump a load of ham in the kosher section. Some of it ripped open," she wrote.
"Reported to staff who said they would deal with it swiftly. Hoping they did, and the person responsible gets bad karma."
A spokesperson for the supermarket said the products were "immediately removed".
"We’re sorry for any upset this has caused. We immediately removed these products from the kosher section,” the spokesperson said, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
"Although this appears to have been an accident in a busy store, it should not have happened and we will check the kosher section regularly to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the spokesperson stressed.
In 2014, Tesco said it will no longer sell products originating from Judea and Samaria, though it stressed at the time the move was not "politically motivated".
While it is unclear at this time whether the latest incident was of an anti-Semitic nature, anti-Semitism has been on the rise in Britain.
A report released in August by Britain’s Jewish community found that a record number of nearly 900 anti-Semitic incidents had been recorded in the United Kingdom for the first six months of 2019.
A government report released in October found that the number of religion-based hate crimes against Jews in England and Wales nearly doubled in 2018.