MCLC: new version of Bo Xilai meeting

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: new version of Bo Xilai meeting
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/7/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/world/asia/new-account-of-bo-xilai-meetin
g-with-wang-lijun.html

In Chinese Murder Mystery, Take 2 for Big Scene
By EDWARD WONG 

CHONGQING, China — In the chill of late January, around the time Chinese
were celebrating the Lunar New Year, the police chief of this foggy
southwestern 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 longtime 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 longtime 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, rumor-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.