AMERICAN police in the San Francisco Bay area were seeking clues Tuesday as to how a plastic bag of methamphetamine turned up in the Halloween candy of an 8-year-old girl.

    The girl’s father found a pinkish-colored Ziploc pouch containing a powdery substance while checking his daughter’s trick-or-treat collection Monday morning and called authorities, police said.

    The father told police the bag apparently ended up in the child’s Halloween candy while they were out trick-or-treating Friday night near their home in the East Bay town of Hercules, California, about 40 km northeast of San Francisco.

    Testing of the substance, measuring one-10th of a gram, revealed it to be crystal methamphetamine, “a small amount was enough to do damage to an 8-year-old girl had she gotten into it on her own,” said detective Connie Van Putten, a spokeswoman for the Hercules Police Department.

    She said detectives were re-interviewing the father and daughter Tuesday to determine precisely which homes they visited on Halloween and were trying to see if fingerprints could be lifted from the plastic bag that carried the meth.

    The father told police he and his daughter were trick-or-treating in a well-lit, 10-block area of town called the Promenade, consisting of quaint Victorian homes with picket fences, which is a popular gathering spot on Halloween.

    Van Putten said the case appears to be an isolated incident, and detectives have no immediate evidence that the girl was singled out as a target.

    “We are leaning toward it being an accident, but we are not ruling out an intentional act,” she said. “Whoever it was may have intended to put it in somebody’s candy but not hers.”

    A 10th of a gram of meth, while a relative small amount, is enough to bring felony charges for possession of a controlled substance, she said. (SD-Agencies)