High street retiler Primark has pulled a range of Walking Dead t-shirts from its stores after a complaint claiming they were offensive and racist.

The t-shirts showed a bloodied baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, which the character Negan uses to smash his victims to pieces, with the rhyme ‘Eeny, Meeny Miny, Moe’ written on it.

The killer, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the hit TV show about survivors of the zombie apocalypse, calls his bat Lucille.

Couple Ian and Gwen Lucraft spotted the t-shirt in a Primark store in Sheffield last week and complained to store management that it was ‘offensive’.

Methodist minister Mr Lucraft said the ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe’ rhyme was racist as it was well known that the rhyme went on to say ‘catch a n****r’ by his toe’.

Glasgow Times:

He also said the bloodied bat was offensive, telling The Sheffield Star: "It was fantastically offensive and I can only assume that no one in the process of ordering it knew what they were doing or were aware of its subliminal messages.

"This image relates directly to the practice of assaulting black people in America."

Mr Lucraft wrote a letter to Primark chief execexutive Paul Marchant asking him to remove the t-shirt from sale which bosses decided to do after receiving his complaint.

A spokesman for Primark confirmed the T-shirts are now being removed from all of its stores, adding: "The T-shirt in question is licensed merchandise for the U.S. television series, The Walking Dead, and the quote and image are taken directly from the show.

"Any offence caused by its design was wholly unintentional and Primark sincerely apologises for this."