A senior member of India’s government, the transport minister Nitin Gadkari, said in TV interview that “this is not a natural virus, it is an artificial virus… this is a virus from a laboratory.”

His remarks follow recent suggestions by the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo that the virus came from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan - an accusation that state media in China has strongly rejected.

Scientific analysis indicates the virus came from animals, and was not man-made.

The BBC's science editor, Paul Rincon, reports that there's currently no evidence that any research institute in Wuhan was the source of Sars-CoV-2 (which causes Covid-19)

A US study of the coronavirus genome published in March found no signs it had been engineered.