The wife of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) was told several years ago by a doctor that her nervous system had suffered irreversible damage because she had been steadily ingesting poison that someone had slipped into the capsules of her daily herbal medicine, one of her lawyers said in an interview this week.
Gu Kailai (谷開來) discovered the poisoning after she fainted in 2007 at the funeral of her father-in-law, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader, said the lawyer, Li Xiaolin. He added that Gu became withdrawn and curtailed her trips outside her home after learning of the plot. Li said that Gu genuinely believed that someone was trying to kill her, but that he did not know who she suspected.
The new details of Gu’s suspicions of a murder plot further reveal the atmosphere of fear and tension in the Bo household, which might have contributed to the death in November last year of British businessman Neil Heywood, who had known the family for years.
In August, a court convicted Gu, a lawyer, of poisoning Heywood after believing that he posed a threat to her son. Legal experts have questioned the trial and the official narrative of the killing.
Last month, the CCP announced that Bo would be prosecuted for crimes that included abuse of power and taking bribes. The scandal has disrupted China’s once-a-decade leadership transition scheduled to begin this fall.
Li had previously said that Gu believed she was the victim of a poisoning plot, but not exactly when those fears began or how she believed that the poison had been administered.
Li said that before 2007, Gu had been taking a rare and expensive herbal medicine that Chinese call “winter worm, summer grass” for longevity and better health. The medicine, which Gu was ingesting in capsules filled with red powder, became popular with middle-class and wealthy Chinese in recent years. It is made from a parasitic fungus found on the Tibetan plateau that uses caterpillars as hosts and kills them.
Gu fainted in January 2007 at the funeral of Bo’s father, Bo Yibo (薄一波), one of the “eight immortals” of the CCP known for guiding China’s economic transformation, Li said. Photographs of the funeral that have circulated on the Internet show Gu dressed in black and looking gaunt while greeting party leaders and army generals. Li said a family member who met Gu at the funeral after not having seen her for a while “was shocked by how much weight Gu Kailai had lost and how frail she looked.”
After the fainting incident, a doctor looked into all possible causes, Li said. The doctor discovered that the red powder in Gu’s capsules had a mix of lead and mercury, he said. One of the effects of the poison was that it caused Gu’s hands to shake, so she took up knitting and embroidery at the doctor’s recommendation, Li added.
Li Danyu (李丹宇), Bo’s first wife, said in an earlier interview that Bo and his family suspected Li Wangzhi (李望知), her son from her marriage with Bo, of masterminding the poisoning. Bo relayed his suspicions in October last year to Li Danyu’s older brother, who is married to Gu’s older sister, Li Danyu said.
She said her son was not involved in any murder plot and that Gu might have been seeking to frame him. She said he last saw his father in 2007, at the funeral of the grandfather, where Gu was said to have fainted. Bo’s family told the first son to stand at the rear of the family procession.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the