Romania discovered a new outbreak of bird flu in a village 90 km east of Bucharest, indicating that the disease might be spreading towards the capital, the farm ministry said on Tuesday.

Since October, Romania has found avian flu in 26 villages in and around the Danube delta on the Black Sea, where the deadly strain of the virus was first discovered 300 km from Bucharest.

"The H5 type was isolated in samples from domestic fowl from the village of Albesti in Ialomita county," the ministry said in a statement.

It said samples would be sent to a British laboratory to find out whether it was the deadly H5N1 strain. Around 8,000 domestic birds in Albesti are being culled and the village was quarantined, it said.

The ministry also said it confirmed the H5 virus type in samples taken from hens in the village of Stelnica, around 160 km east of Bucharest, where avian flu was suspected last week.

Nine cases have been confirmed as the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain since October, and the ministry said it will send seven more samples from the counties of Ialomita and Calarasi in the east of the country to Britain to be tested.