| Gu admits responsibility for killing of UK businessman |
HEFEI (China) The Chinese woman accused of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood admitted guilt and blamed a mental breakdown for the events that brought her to trial and toppled her once-powerful politician husband, Bo Xilai, state media said on Friday.
The first extended comments on the case from Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, appeared in a Xinhua news agency account which said she and a household aide, Zhang Xiaojun, had “confessed to intentional homicide” in poisoning Heywood in November.
“I will accept and calmly face any sentence and I also expect a fair and just court decision,” Gu told her trial on Thursday, according to the Xinhua account, which could not be independently verified.
“This case has been like a huge stone weighing on me for more than half a year. What a nightmare,” Gu said.
But the state media account of Gu’s testimony also repeated her argument that she turned on Heywood, a long-time family friend who had helped her son Bo Guagua go to school in England, only after she concluded he was a threat to her son.
“During those days last November, I suffered a mental breakdown after learning that my son was in jeopardy,” Gu said. “The tragedy which was created by me was not only extended to Neil, but also to several families.”
The latest official account from the scandal that has beset China’s ruling Communist Party came on the same day that four Chinese policemen admitted to attempting to shield Gu from suspicion of the murder of Heywood, an official said, in another damaging development for the ex-Politburo member.
The official’s statement, given after an 11-hour hearing barred to non-official media, formally establishes for the first time that there was an attempted cover-up of the murder of businessman Heywood and comes just a day after Bo’s wife, Gu, chose not to contest a charge of poisoning Heywood.
Heywood’s death had been attributed to a possible heart attack brought on by too much alcohol.
Court official, Tang Yigan, said in the eastern city of Hefei that the four - police from Bo’s former power base of southwest Chongqing, the vast municipality where Heywood was killed - had found that Gu was a prime suspect.
Reuters
|
 |
|
|
| NEWS UPDATES |
|
|
|
|
|
|
