A director of an abattoir who allowed hundreds of chickens to suffer and die in crates whilst waiting to be processed has been ordered to pay £1,500.

And the company, Yorkshire Poultry Products Ltd, was sent to the crown court to be sentenced after Bradford magistrates were told it had a string of previous convictions for breaching animal welfare regulations.

The court was told yesterday by Alex Hoffer, prosecuting on behalf of the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, that when a vet visited the firm on Hammerton Street, Bradford, in April last year he noticed many birds in the holding area were suffering from heat stress.

When he investigated further he found 797 of the chickens, which had been in the holding area for seven hours, had died.

Mr Hoffer told the magistrates that the chickens should not be left in that area for more than one hour but when a vet returned to the abattoir three weeks later, he found chickens had again been left too long and 120 had died.

A further visit in June revealed chickens had been left in the crates for up to eight hours and more than 500 were dead.

Both Yorkshire Poultry and director Ghulam Mujitba, 39, of Altar Drive, Bradford, pleaded guilty to three counts of breaching animal welfare regulations. Mujitba was fined £1,000 and ordered to pay £500 in costs.

The court was told that in April last year, the company had been fined £11,500 and ordered to pay £3,951 costs by a judge at the city's crown court after pleading guilty to ten breaches of food hygiene and animal welfare regulations.

In that case, the court heard how more than 2,000 chickens had died from heat exhaustion while waiting to be killed at a Bradford slaughterhouse. A vet who visited the premises described "a mountain of dead birds" and found evidence that some birds may have gone through the killing process while alive and conscious.

At yesterday's hearing, Mujitba pleaded guilty on behalf of Yorkshire Poultry to a further ten charges of failing to comply with improvement notices issued by an official vet responsible for the company.

Mr Hoffer told the magistrates that the abattoir had risked spreading disease to farms when they returned the crates that the chickens had been transported in without cleaning them properly.

The company had also failed to properly clean the plastic trays which the chickens were kept on and they still had chicken remains and other debris still attached.

The court heard that the many of the staff were not properly trained and that the company had not complied with EU regulations and in all the vet had issued ten improvement notices which the company had failed to act on.

The magistrates were told the company had spent £1.5m last year and had already spent £1.4m this year in new machinery to try and improve the plant and had made considerable efforts to ensure that the problems did not occur again.

But the magistrates told Mujitba that the offences were disturbing and that they were sending the case to the crown court for sentencing in June.