UK Anti-Doping is ready to fight any attempt by the World Anti-Doping Agency to seize its stock of Sir Mo Farah’s urine and blood samples during an investigation into athletes trained by his disgraced former coach.

The chief executive of Ukad, Nicole Sapstead, said she would block the release of samples stored for future retesting unless there was “credible evidence” to suggest they contained banned substances.

Before the end of his tenure as Wada president, Sir Craig Reedie announced a probe into those athletes to have worked with Alberto Salazar, which he said would include finding “samples we can retest”.

Ukad refused a request to hand over those it held for Farah during the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation into Salazar, who has lodged an appeal against the four-year ban he was handed in October for doping offences.

Britain’s anti-doping agency said at the time that retesting risked degrading samples which are stored for up to 10 years for testing using new detection methods.

Insisting Ukad was “not going to risk samples that we hold in storage”, Sapstead said on Friday: “If the police come in here and say, ‘I want to rummage around because I have this evidence to suggest that your purse is in this handbag’, please, help yourself. Come and have a look in my handbag.