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By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Scientists investigating last week's outbreak of bird flu on a British farm run by Europe's leading turkey producer Bernard Matthews said on Thursday there might be a link with an outbreak in Hungary in January.

Contradicting statements by British officials in Brussels on Tuesday that it was unlikely there was a Hungarian link, the government said there was indeed a possible connection.

A statement from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said preliminary checks had shown the virus found in the Suffolk outbreak "may well be identical" with that in the Hungarian one and could be spread by infected meat.

Hungary culled thousands of poultry after it became the first European Union country to report a case of bird flu this year.

"Our investigations have shown that one possible route of infection is poultry product imported from Hungary," said deputy chief vet Fred Landeg.

"The company involved have voluntarily agreed to temporarily suspend the movement of poultry products between their outlets in the UK and Hungary until the investigation is complete."

Although Landeg did not name the company involved, a DEFRA spokeswoman confirmed that suspicions were focusing on shipments of partly processed poultry meat from Bernard Matthews Hungarian operation.

"Each week approximately 38 tonnes of partly processed turkeys are transported from the linked Hungarian plant to Suffolk for final processing," she said. "We have ruled out the movement of workers between Hungary and Suffolk."

She added that it now looked increasingly unlikely that the infection had been spread by a wild bird.

The cull of 160,000 turkeys on Bernard Matthews farm in Suffolk, eastern England, where the H5N1 strain of bird flu broke out, was completed on Monday.

Russia and Japan banned British poultry imports after the country's first outbreak of the H5N1 strain in farmed poultry that sparked the cull.

Workers wearing white protective suits, gloves and masks took the livestock away in crates to be gassed after discovery of the disease.

DEFRA said the whole site remained sealed off but that checks had now revealed that birds from three of the 21 sheds had tested positive for H5N1

The H5N1 virus has spread into the Middle East, Africa and Europe since it re-emerged in Asia in 2003 and although it remains largely an animal disease, it can kill people who come into close contact with infected birds.

The virus has killed 166 people in the past four years.

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