GSK targeted by animal rights extremists

UK police are investigating threatening letters posted to individual shareholders who have been threatened if they do not sell their stakes in UK-headquartered global number two drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.

The previously unknown Campaign Against Huntingdon Life Sciences claims to be writing to every one of GSK's 170,000 small investors in an attempt to pressure them into selling their holdings in an escalation of the increasingly violent campaign against the Huntingdon Life Sciences animal research laboratory in Cambridgeshire.

At least 50 people have contacted GSK to complain that they had received the letters from the animal rights group. GSK (formerly GlaxoWellcome) ceased contact with HLS in 1998 but reinstated its relationship a year later.