A pig farm in Jiaxing City, east China's Zhejiang Province, on Wednesday confessed to dumping dead pigs into the Huangpu River, local authorities said.

The admission came after a preliminary investigation traced the birthplace of some of the dead pigs found in a section of the river in Shanghai to Jiaxing, the Jiaxing city government said.

Shanghai has provided 14 ear tags collected from the dead pigs, and Jiaxing is still investigating 13 of these tags.

Nearly 6,000 dead pigs had been pulled out of a section of the Huangpu River in Shanghai as of Tuesday.

Local media had previously reported that the corpses may have come from the upper reaches of the Huangpu River in Jiaxing City.

The Jiaxing city government said a total of 70,000 pigs died due to crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the beginning of the year. All the collected corpses were disposed of safely, and no mass swine epidemic had broken out in the region so far.

(Xinhua News Agency March 13, 2013)