In the chill of late January, around the time Chinese were
celebrating the Lunar New Year, the police chief of this foggy south-western
metropolis pressed Bo Xilai, the ambitious Communist Party official who ruled
the area, with evidence that Mr. Bo’s wife had been involved in a murder.
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In Chinese Murder Mystery, Take 2 for Big Scene
By EDWARD WONG
07 June 2012
In the chill of late January, around the time Chinese were celebrating the Lunar New Year, the police chief of this foggy south-western metropolis pressed Bo Xilai, the ambitious Communist Party official who ruled the area, with evidence that Mr. Bo’s wife had been involved in a murder.
That meeting, supposedly on Jan. 28, ultimately led to Mr. Bo’s downfall and the nation’s biggest political scandal in years. But what transpired between Mr. Bo and his long-time ally, Wang Lijun, has always been a bit of a mystery.
To the extent there is a quasi-official version of that meeting — one presumably based on Mr. Wang’s account to Chinese investigators and circulated among party officials — it portrays Mr. Bo as reacting angrily to Mr. Wang’s accusations. Mr. Wang has also told American officials he met in the nearby city of Chengdu and others that Mr. Bo punched him in the face.
But a different story has circulated among several people close to the two men, according to those who have heard it described to them. And it is a version of events that paints Mr. Bo in a different light, one that shows him as being less emotional and more calculating.
That version goes like this: Mr. Wang actually confronted Mr. Bo on Jan. 18 with evidence linking Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, to the murder by poisoning of Neil Heywood, a British businessman and long-time friend of the Bo family. It was the first that Mr. Bo had heard of his wife’s alleged involvement in the death. Mr. Bo agreed at the time to allow Mr. Wang to act against his wife based on the evidence, even if that meant Ms. Gu would be put on trial. At the meeting, Mr. Wang also told Mr. Bo that three police officers had asked to be transferred from the investigation after they discovered the murder was tied to Mr. Bo’s family.
That story was told to friends by Yu Junshi, a shadowy fixer in Mr. Bo’s inner court. Mr. Yu worked in the 1990s as an overseas intelligence agent and owned two dogs that bit a man to death in Chongqing last July. He was also close to Mr. Wang and has been detained in the party’s broad investigation into Mr. Bo, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing in March and suspended from the party’s Politburo the next month.
“At the meeting, Bo Xilai said, ‘Leave me alone for a while and let me think about this,’ “ said a person who has met Mr. Yu and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being officially questioned over the events. “Then, to show he’s righteous, Bo Xilai said he would be willing to allow his wife to be tried.”
Mr. Wang was pleased because Mr. Bo’s reaction showed that Mr. Bo trusted Mr. Wang, the person said, citing the story told by Mr. Yu.
But on Jan. 21, Chen Cungen, the head of the Chongqing party branch’s organization department, which oversees personnel issues, told Mr. Wang that he would be transferred from the police chief post, according to the story that Mr. Yu told his friends. Then on Jan. 28, both Mr. Chen and Liu Guanglei, the head of the local politics and law committee, gave Mr. Wang formal notice of his removal from the police force. In this account, Mr. Bo did not deliver the message in person to Mr. Wang; the two never met again after their talk on Jan. 18.
“Wang Lijun knows how to fool people,” said the person who has met Mr. Yu. “He appeared to accept this demotion to fool them.”
But Mr. Wang was furious, and Mr. Yu met with him the night of Jan. 31 in a suite in police headquarters. Mr. Yu did not emerge until dawn. On Feb. 6, four days after his transfer was publicly announced, Mr. Wang drove to the United States Consulate in Chengdu with a file on the Heywood death, after having asked another senior police official, Wang Pengfei, to arrange a car, said people with police contacts in Chongqing.
In the murky, rumour-filled world surrounding Mr. Bo’s downfall, it is unclear exactly where the truth lies in the different accounts of the final meeting between Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, the police chief. Mr. Bo is known to be both baroque and shrewd, and he could have reacted in any number of ways in the meeting, people familiar with the two men say.
Mr. Wang spent a night in the consulate before leaving in the care of officials from the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. Airline ticket purchase records showed that a first-class seat for a Feb. 8 flight to Beijing had been bought for Mr. Wang, according to a Bloomberg report in February. A first-class ticket was also purchased for Qiu Jin, a vice minister of state security.
There have been various stories about the evidence that Mr. Wang had gathered linking Ms. Gu to the death of Mr. Heywood, whose body was found Nov. 15 in a villa at the Nanshan Lijing Resort, set in lush hills on the outskirts of Chongqing.
Some police officers have told friends in Chongqing that Ms. Gu was recorded on a security camera leaving the villa the night of Mr. Heywood’s death, said a person with police contacts in Chongqing. If so, that would help explain why Mr. Wang was so determined to challenge Mr. Bo with the evidence against his wife.
Further speculation over the evidence has arisen after comments by Henry C. Lee, a prominent American forensic scientist who had met Mr. Wang at conferences in Asia. Mr. Lee said in an interview that he received a telephone call sometime in February from a Chongqing police detective asking whether Mr. Lee’s laboratory in Connecticut could analyze a blood sample from a person who had died after drinking. (Police officials in Chongqing said last year that Mr. Heywood had died of excessive drinking, even though he was not known to be a heavy drinker.)
Mr. Lee said the request was not unusual because his laboratory gets many calls from foreign police departments, including ones in China. “I said ‘O.K., send the sample,’“ he said. “If it’s a routine pathological analysis, we can help them. If it’s something beyond my expertise, I can introduce them to someone.”
Mr. Lee said he was never told whom the blood sample was from, and that he never received it.
Shi Da contributed research from Beijing.
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