Chongqing Cop Kept Heywood Blood Sample to Defy Cover-Up

The only piece of physical evidence showing that Neil Heywood had been poisoned is a blood sample kept by a Chongqing police officer who had refused to go along with efforts at covering up the murder, reports the overseas Chinese-language site Boxun.

By confessing to Heywood’s murder and to various “economic crimes”, Gu Kailai appears to have cooperated fully in Beijing’s efforts to orchestrate a quick, uncomplicated end to the public portion of the scandal that brought down her husband Bo Xilai, Chongqing’s former Communist Party boss.

“When Heywood was drunk and vomited and wanted to drink water, she then took pre-prepared poison that she had asked Zhang Xiaojun to carry and poured it into Heywood’s mouth, killing him,” said an official recounting to the press how Gu invited Heywood to Chongqing from Beijing and spent the evening with him at his hotel leading up to the poisoning.

But Gu may never have faced murder charges in the first place but for a Chongqing police officer named Wang Pengfei who had refused to be intimidated and bribed to go along with the coverup orchestrated by Gu and, most likely, Bo. Instead Wang kept a sample of the blood taken from Heywood shortly after he was found dead in the room of a secluded resort hotel in the hills on the outskirts of central Chongqing.

Gu managed to have the body cremated without an autopsy, destroying any other evidence that might be contrary to the “official” finding that he had died of too much alcohol consumption. That blood sample was the only piece of evidence to substantiate the accusation that Gu had poisoned Heywood. It was likely the evidence on which Bo’s right-hand man and then Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun confronted Bo with the threat to expose the murder. That threat and Bo’s efforts at silencing Wang led to Wang’s desperate flight to the US consulate in Chongqing in early February, setting on the biggest political crisis in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Gu is said to have asked Bo to have Wang Pengfei, the uncooperative police investigator, detained for 43 days. Wang Pengfei was briefly freed on March 15 when Bo was dismissed as Chongqing’s party chief, then arrested again on June 1, ironically, for obstruction of justice. The other three men involved in the investigation of Heywood’s murder have also been detained and are currently in Hefei facing similar charges, Boxun said.

Thanks to Gu’s full confession to the murder, the trial lasted just seven hours Thursday at the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court in eastern Anhui province. The court found her guilty of murder but won’t be announcing her sentence until a later date.

Gu was represented by a legal team appointed by the government. The Chinese government only appoints lawyers where the accused can’t afford lawyers or where she could potentially face the death penalty. Gu’s mother, a veteran of China’s revolutionary-era PLA, had hired prominent defense lawyers from Beijing but they were barred from the case by Hefei prosecutors.

Gu’s appointed lawyers are under orders not to answer questions from foreign media outlets, so all information emerging from the case come either from official announcements or leaks carefully arranged to help defuse the news value of both the trial and the sentence when it is rendered.

Efforts by Gu’s mother to paint her daughter as being mentally ill in order to spare her the death penalty may become a factor in the sentence. But reports suggest that the court will likely rely on Gu’s contention that she sought to protect her son Guagua from threats of harm by Heywood to spare Gu the death penalty.

This report is from: http://goldsea.com/Text/index.php?id=13415