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 He added that Gu became withdrawn and curtailed her trips outside her home after learning of the plot.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.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS