(BRUSSELS) - The European Commission said it had carried out a third-day of raids Wednesday at pharmaceutical companies in an antitrust probe, with Israeli group Teva and French firm Servier reporting they had been among those visited.

The raids "began on Monday and continued on Tuesday and today," a spokesman for the European Commission said on Wednesday.

Europe's top antitrust watchdog has refused to identify the companies but several big players, France's Sanofi-Aventis, Swiss Novartis, Germany's Bayer and Merck and Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, said they were not targeted.

A US-based spokeswoman for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries told Dow Jones Newswires that the generic drugmaker's British operations had been visited by the European Commission's competition regulators.

A spokesman for French group Servier also acknowledged that "an investigation is underway" targeting the company.

The commission said on Tuesday it suspected that rules "prohibiting restrictive business practices and/or the abuse of a dominant market position may have been infringed."

Each European citizen spends an average of 400 euros per year on medication, amounting to a massive 200-billion-euro market that has attracted much attention in Brussels.

Last January, the commission launched an antitrust probe into the entire pharmaceutical industry amid concerns about uncompetitive behaviour in the sector.

That original probe led to raids on several laboratories belonging to Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis' Sandoz unit, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca among others.

A commission spokesman said that the latest operation was not directly linked to the broader investigation, the preliminary results of which are due to be published on Friday.

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