http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/16/us-china-leader-murder-idUSBRE83F09620120416


Exclusive: Briton killed after threat to
expose Chinese leader's wife: sources

By Chris Buckley

CHONGQING, China
Mon Apr 16, 2012

CHONGQING, China (Reuters) - The British businessman whose murder has sparked political upheaval in China was poisoned after he threatened to expose a plan by a Chinese leader's wife to move money abroad, two sources with knowledge of the police investigation said.

It was the first time a specific motive has been revealed for Neil Heywood's murder last November, a death which ended Chinese leader Bo Xilai's hopes of emerging as a top central leader and threw off balance the Communist Party's looming leadership succession.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, asked Heywood late last year to move a large sum of money abroad, and she became outraged when he demanded a larger cut of the money than she had expected due to the size of the transaction, the sources said.

She accused him of being greedy and hatched a plan to kill him after he said he could expose her dealings, one of the sources said, summarizing the police case. Both sources have spoken to investigators in Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese city where Heywood was killed and where Bo had cast himself as a crime-fighting Communist Party leader.

Gu is in police custody on suspicion of committing or arranging Heywood's murder, though no details of the motive or the crime itself have been publicly released, other than a general comment from Chinese state media that he was killed after a financial dispute.

The sources have close ties to Chinese police and said they were given details of the investigation.

They said Heywood - formerly a close friend of Gu and who had been helping her with her overseas financial dealings - was killed after he threatened to expose what she was doing.

"Heywood told her that if she thought he was being too greedy, then he didn't need to become involved and wouldn't take a penny of the money, but he also said he could also expose it," the first source said.

The sources said police suspect the 41-year-old was poisoned by a drink. They did not know precisely where he died in Chongqing. But they and other sources with access to official information say they believe Heywood was killed at a secluded hilltop retreat, the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, which is also marketed as the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

The sources said Gu and Heywood, who had lived in China since the early 1990s, shared a long and close personal relationship, but were not romantically involved.

The sources did not know details of the offshore transactions that Heywood facilitated for Gu, but said exposure of the deals would have imperiled her and her ambitious husband, who was campaigning for promotion to the top ranks of China's leadership. Bo has since been ousted over the scandal.

"After Gu Kailai found that Heywood wouldn't agree to go along and was even resisting with threats - that he could expose this money with unknown provenance - then that was a major risk to Gu Kailai and Bo Xilai," said the first source, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

It was not possible to get official confirmation of the case police are building against Gu. The Chinese government did not respond to faxed questions about the case. Some of Bo's leftist supporters have said the case could be a campaign to discredit him.

Gu, who is in custody and facing a possible death sentence for murder, and Bo could not be reached for comment. Bo has not been seen since appearing at parliament in March, when he held a news conference decrying the "filth" being poured on his family.

Efforts to contact Heywood's mother and sister at their homes in London were unsuccessful. The door to the mother's home carried a note saying she would not speak to reporters.

HEYWOOD WAS GU'S 'SOULMATE'

Heywood had spent his last week in Chongqing in Nan'an district, an area politically loyal to Bo, and stayed at two hotels: the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel and the Sheraton hotel.

Staff at each hotel said they knew nothing of a British man dying there. A guard was barring access to an apparently empty row of villas within the grounds of the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel on Sunday and Monday, saying a meeting was going on.

Heywood's falling-out with Gu followed a period in which she had grown distant from her ambitious, perpetually busy husband and she had turned to Heywood as a soulmate, sources said.

"Bo and Gu Kailai had not been a proper husband and wife for years ... Gu Kailai and Heywood had a deep personal relationship and she took the break between them deeply to heart," said Wang Kang, a well-connected Chongqing businessman who has learned some details of the case from Chinese officials.

"Her mentality was 'you betrayed me, and so I'll get my revenge'," Wang said in his office, decorated with pictures of himself meeting senior officials, including Bo's late father, the revolutionary veteran Bo Yibo, a comrade of Mao Zedong.

Heywood got to know the powerful family when Bo Xilai was mayor of Dalian in the 1990s. Heywood helped with getting the couple's son, Bo Guagua, into an exclusive British school, Harrow, said one of the sources with police contacts.

The scandal over Heywood's death broke in February when Bo's former police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to a U.S. consulate after he had confronted Bo with allegations of Gu's involvement. He spent about 24 hours inside the consulate before he left into the hands of Chinese central government authorities.

Bo was stripped of all his party positions last week, ending his bid to join the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership at a Party Congress late this year, and opening the door to jockeying among rivals to get a place in the new lineup.

It was not immediately clear how Heywood would have helped Gu shift large sums of money offshore, though China's capital controls pose a formidable barrier to anyone trying to move large sums of yuan out of the country.

Chinese leaders' salaries are not extravagant and there have been questions about how Bo managed to fund the expensive Western schooling and lifestyle for his son, Bo Guagua, who also studied at Oxford university and is enrolled at Harvard. Bo said in March the schools were funded by scholarships.

The sources said there had been no sign of any dispute between Gu and Heywood until October and November when the argument over funds began. The lack of a paper trail made it difficult for police to determine how much money was involved, they added.

Police suspect Heywood took a poisoned drink, according to one of the sources, and died on November 15. Both sources said Gu was not present at the scene.

The sources said Heywood had stayed at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, a secluded complex of rooms and villas in green hills overlooking Chongqing that Gu Kailai had visited in the past. Staff there said they had no knowledge of the death of a British man at the hotel in November.

[size=14]Now the Western media is publishing all kinds of SH!!!!!!!!!!!!T [color=darkred]about Bo Xilai's wife, Gu Kailai, murdering the Englishman Neil Heywood.

Bo Xilai 'responsible for two more deaths'
In a bid to quash an investigation into his wife for the murder of Neil Heywood, Bo Xilai had at least seven people seized and tortured two to death, according to a document read out to Chinese government officials.

Two former officials in Chongqing said a meeting of the city's Communist party cadres had been called on April 10, the day that the formal charges were announced against Mr Bo and his wife, Gu Kailai.

"Officials were told not to bring their mobile phones into the room, not to make any notes, just to listen," said one former official, who asked not to be named.

They were then read a description of how Mr Bo, the powerful party secretary of Chongqing, had quarrelled with his police chief, Wang Lijun, after he heard that his wife might be implicated in the death of the 41-year-old British businessman.

Apparently fearing for his life, Mr Wang fled to the United States consulate in the city of Chengdu a few days later.

When he heard the news that Mr Wang had fled, Mr Bo was on a trip to Yunnan province, but ordered his personal security team to chase Mr Wang and his associates down.
While the US consulate shielded Mr Wang himself from officers loyal to Mr Bo, the police chief's associates, and other members of the investigation team were captured.

"At least seven of Wang's associates, including his driver, were arrested by Bo, and at least two were tortured to death," said the document that was read out, according to the former official.

As one of the 350 or so members of the Communist party's Central Committee, Mr Bo was entitled to a personal security detail.

He also lived on a military camp in Bagongli, a suburb of Chongqing, and had close ties to the People's Liberation Army.

The former official said the details had been read to all officials and party members above county level in order to consolidate support for the party's decision to remove Mr Bo from power.

Since Mr Bo's downfall, the China's state media has printed a stream of editorials calling for stability and loyalty to Hu Jintao, the Chinese president.

"It is when they write that we should be strong and confident that you know there is little confidence," said a second official. "Beijing is worried about the reaction of the people but actually they should not be."

He revealed that propaganda work to unite Chongqing's administration had begun even before Mr Wang tried to defect.

"A few days before the incident, there was a conference for propaganda leaders, and they were told that in case of a major incident, the foreign media would try to sensationalise it. When I heard this, I suspected something was about to happen," said the official, who also asked not to be named.

The alleged deaths of two of Mr Wang's aides could be part of the "serious breaches of party discipline" that Mr Bo is being investigated for.

Meanwhile, both sources dismissed speculation that Mr Heywood and Mr Bo's wife were romantically attached. "If she had grown unhappy, she would have been careful to choose someone outside her inner circle," said one.

They also said that Xia Deliang, the district chief in Nan'an, was not part of Mr Bo's inner circle.

In recent days it has been suggested that Mr Xia may have supplied the cyanide that is thought to have been slipped into Mr Heywood's drink.

The official is one of the scores of people who have been detained as the Chinese government deepens its investigation into the case.

It emerged yesterday that two more members of Mr Bo and Mr Wang's close circle at the top of the Chongqing police force have also been arrested.

Guo Weiguo, the vice bureau chief of Chongqing's Public Security bureau, is said to have supported Mr Bo in his attempt to stifle the murder investigation. Li Yang, the head of general team of criminal police, has also been removed.

Yesterday (Thurs) The Times reported that Zhang Xiaojun, a member of the Bo household who has also been arrested for his alleged involvement in the murder, travelled with Mr Heywood on his flight to Chongqing a day before he died.

According to the Times, Mr Zhang may have been put in charge of making sure that Mr Heywood made his appointment with the Bo family in Chongqing.

On November 14, he was found poisoned at a private villa in the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, a secluded three-star resort on a forested mountain overlooking the city.

Mr Zhang, who is under arrest, is thought to be around 30 years old and originally served as a bodyguard to Mr Bo's father, Bo Yibo

A lot of ****** has been written in past week on Bo guagua the so called playboy of Harvard. I wonder how much of it true. The jewish media in UK seem to be leading the charge in publishing so called inside info. I knew the old photos of him mingling with those western chicks when he was studying in England is eventually gonna bite him in the *****.

The problem with the chinese govt and media is that the blackout and scarcity of info means outside forces can fill in the void with their own brand of info. China should learn from the west how to do effective public relations and damage control

Bo was over ambitious in his desire to reach the very top of the government, the politiburo but his downfall is almost entirely due to his wife and his own stupidity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/asia/bo-xilai-said-to-have-spied-on-top-china-officials.html?_r=1

Ousted Chinese Leader Is Said to
Have Spied on Other Top Officials

By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and IAN JOHNSON
Published: April 25, 2012

BEIJING — When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis.

The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official investigation that helped topple Chongqing’s charismatic leader, Bo Xilai, in a political cataclysm that has yet to reach a conclusion.

Until now, the downfall of Mr. Bo has been cast largely as a tale of a populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some top leaders in Beijing and was brought down by accusations that his wife had arranged the murder of Neil Heywood, a British consultant, after a business dispute. But the hidden wiretapping, previously alluded to only in internal Communist Party accounts of the scandal, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party leaders to turn on Mr. Bo.

The story of how China’s president was monitored also shows the level of mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology. But some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist rule.

“This society has bred mistrust and violence,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a historian of Communist China’s elite-level machinations over the past half century. “Leaders know you have to watch your back because you never know who will put a knife in it.”

Nearly a dozen people with party ties, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, confirmed the wiretapping, as well as a widespread program of bugging across Chongqing. But the party’s public version of Mr. Bo’s fall omits it.

The official narrative and much foreign attention has focused on the more easily grasped death of Mr. Heywood in November. When Mr. Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun, was stripped of his job and feared being implicated in Bo family affairs, he fled to the United States Consulate in Chengdu, where he spoke mostly about Mr. Heywood’s death.

The murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Mr. Bo’s opponents with an unassailable reason to have him removed. But party insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated for serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts to grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.

“Everyone across China is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining stability,” said one official with a central government media outlet, referring to surveillance tactics. “But not everyone dares to monitor party central leaders.”

According to senior party members, including editors, academics and people with ties to the military, Mr. Bo’s eavesdropping operations began several years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance buildup, ostensibly for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political stability.

The architect was Mr. Wang, a nationally decorated crime fighter who had worked under Mr. Bo in the northeast province of Liaoning. Together they installed “a comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the Internet,” according to the government media official.

One of several noted cybersecurity experts they enlisted was Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is often called the father of China’s “Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast Internet censorship system. Most recently, Mr. Fang advised the city on a new police information center using cloud-based computing, according to state news media reports. Late last year, Mr. Wang was named a visiting professor at Mr. Fang’s university.

Together, Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang unleashed a drive to smash what they said were crime rings that controlled large portions of Chongqing’s economic life. In interviews, targets of the crackdown marveled at the scale and determination with which local police intercepted their communications.

“On the phone, we dared not mention Bo Xilai or Wang Lijun,” said Li Jun, a fugitive property developer who now lives in hiding abroad. Instead, he and fellow businessmen took to scribbling notes, removing their cellphone batteries and stocking up on unregistered SIM cards to thwart surveillance as the crackdown mounted, he said.

Li Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing law firm, recalled how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full stack of unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, warning him of local wiretapping. Despite these precautions, the Chongqing police ended up arresting Mr. Li on the outskirts of Beijing, about 900 miles away, after he called his client’s wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a hospital.

“They already were there lying in ambush,” Mr. Li said. He added that Wang Lijun, by reputation, was a “tapping freak.”

Political figures were targeted in addition to those suspected of being mobsters.

One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing information obtained from a colonel he recently dined with, said Mr. Bo had tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar who was said to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor.

“Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders’ attitudes toward him were,” the analyst said.

In one other instance last year, two journalists said, operatives were caught intercepting a conversation between the office of Mr. Hu and Liu Guanglei, a top party law-and-order official whom Mr. Wang had replaced as police chief. Mr. Liu once served under Mr. Hu in the 1980s in Guizhou Province.

Perhaps more worrisome to Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, however, was the increased scrutiny from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which by the beginning of 2012 had stationed up to four separate teams in Chongqing, two undercover, according to the political analyst, who cited Discipline Inspection sources. One line of inquiry, according to several party academics, involved Mr. Wang’s possible role in a police bribery case that unfolded last year in a Liaoning city where he once was police chief.

Beyond making a routine inspection, it is not clear why the disciplinary official who telephoned Mr. Hu — Ma Wen, the minister of supervision — was in Chongqing. Her high-security land link to Mr. Hu from the state guesthouse in Chongqing was monitored on Mr. Bo’s orders. The topic of the call is unknown but was probably not vital. Most phones are so unsafe that important information is often conveyed only in person or in writing.

But Beijing was galled that Mr. Bo would wiretap Mr. Hu, whether intentionally or not, and turned central security and disciplinary investigators loose on his police chief, who bore the brunt of the scrutiny over the next couple of months.

“Bo wanted to push the responsibility onto Wang,” one senior party editor said. “Wang couldn’t dare say it was Bo’s doing.”

Yet at some point well before fleeing Chongqing, Mr. Wang filed a pair of complaints to the inspection commission, the first anonymously and the second under his own name, according to a party academic with ties to Mr. Bo.

Both complaints said Mr. Bo had “opposed party central” authorities, including ordering the wiretapping of central leaders. The requests to investigate Mr. Bo were turned down at the time. Mr. Bo, who learned of the charges at a later point, told the academic shortly before his dismissal that he thought he could withstand Mr. Wang’s charges.

Mr. Wang is not believed to have discussed wiretapping at the United States Consulate. Instead, he focused on the less self-incriminating allegations of Mr. Bo’s wife’s arranging the killing of Mr. Heywood.

But tensions between the two men crested, sources said, when Mr. Bo found that Mr. Wang had also wiretapped him and his wife. After Mr. Wang was arrested in February, Mr. Bo detained Mr. Wang’s wiretapping specialist from Liaoning, a district police chief named Wang Pengfei.

Internal party accounts suggest that the party views the wiretapping as one of Mr. Bo’s most serious crimes. One preliminary indictment in mid-March accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting evidence on other leaders.

Party officials, however, say it would be far too damaging to make the wiretapping public. When Mr. Bo is finally charged, wiretapping is not expected to be mentioned. “The things that can be publicized are the economic problems and the killing,” according to the senior official at the government media outlet. “That’s enough to decide the matter in public.”