DONALD Trump has revealed he heard there were heaps of body bags piled up outside a lab in a Chinese city where the Covid-19 epicentre broke out.
The former president suspects "gross incompetence" may have led to Covid-19 escaping a Wuhan lab.
In an interview with, the former president detailed how classified intelligence pointed to the Wuhan Institute of virology as the likely source of the deadly virus which has so far killed at least 4.7million.
Trump said: "Some of the intelligence is classified and I can't talk about it, but it most likely, and when I say most likely, like 95 per cent, came from the Wuhan lab.
"I don't know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence, but one way or the other it came out of Wuhan, it came from the Wuhan lab.
"I started hearing stories… that there were lots of body bags outside of the lab. I heard that a long time ago. And if they did, in fact, have body bags, that was one little indication wasn't it?"
It comes amid fears scientists in the lab were meddling with coronavirus to make it as much as 1,000 stronger than normal.
Trump said it was unlikely the virus was deliberately leaked from the Wuhan lab.
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Rather, Trump said it was probably an accident, suggesting a theory about a scientist lunching outside in a park with his girlfriend who caught it from him.
He said: "I think that it was incompetence. I think that it escaped from the lab through incompetence."
Former Covid-19 Investigator David Asher said the Chinese were undergoing research that was "definitely related to biological warfare ambitions".
But Trump said he wanted to give China the "benefit of the doubt" and did not think it was a weapon.
It comes after a study has claimed a mysterious dark database hidden by China could be the smoking gun that proves Covid did leak from a Wuhan lab.
The Sun Online can reveal the closely guarded cache of information is believed to include unpublished samples of data on new viruses and hidden bat collection sites.
Most of WIV's databases were once accessible online — but have since all been taken systematically taken offline by China.
And it is believed one of the data files — which was password protected before being taken down — could be holding information on new viruses.
World Health Organisation investigators however all but dismissed the lab leak in a joint press conference with their Chinese counterparts - an event which was branded as a "whitewash".
Gilles Demaneuf, a data analyst from DRASTIC, an international team of scientists and sleuths attempting to fill in the gaps on Covid's origins, compiled a 25-page report on the WIV databases.
He told The Sun Online he considers it definitive proof of a "deliberate attempt" at a cover-up by China.
Along with the password-protected data, which was hidden to everyone outside of WIV, research by the team found at least 15 virus databases managed by the lab have been mysteriously taken offline.
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Biochemist Milton Leitenberg, a senior research fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland, said he feared China could spawn another pandemic and has "most certainly not" been honest with the world about the outbreak.
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