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China pol’s wife admits bumping off Brit bizman

Neil Heywood

Neil Heywood

In a seven-hour show trial, the wife of an ousted Chinese political kingpin confessed she fed rat poison to a British businessman to protect her Harvard-educated son.

“I am willing to accept any punishment,” said Gu Kailai, 53, according to an eyewitness to one of China’s most anticipated trials in decades.

Gu made no effort to challenge prosecutors’ claim that she and an aide lured Neil Heywood from Beijing to a Chongqing resort hotel last November to binge on pricey Scotch.

When Heywood was so drunk that he vomited and asked for water, Gu “poured poison into his mouth,” said Hefei court official Tang Yigan.

Gu, dubbed the “Jackie Kennedy of China” because of her elegant lifestyle and marriage to charismatic Politburo member Bo Xilai, had not been seen for months.

Officials gave few details of what went on inside the heavily guarded courtroom yesterday, and the trial was virtually blacked out on Chinese media.

But the officials indicated Gu could avoid the death penalty because she implicated Chinese insiders who helped cover up the murder and because she acted out of fear for her 24-year-old son, Bo Guagua, who was attending Harvard.

A trial eyewitness told The Washington Post that prosecutors revealed an e-mail in which Heywood told the son, “you will be destroyed,” if he didn’t send him about $20 million that Heywood believed he was owed because of a doomed business deal.

Prosecutors said that when Gu’s household aide Zhang Xiaojun told her of the e-mail, she asked Heywood — a business associate and possibly former lover of hers — to come to a resort villa in Chongquing.

Gu had a party official buy a cyanide-based rat poison, which she gave Zhang to carry as he drove Heywood to the villa in Chongquing, where Bo Xilai was the Communist Party boss.

When Gu and Heywood linked up at the villa, she got him drunk on Royal Salute whisky, helped him into bed when he got ill, poured the poison into his mouth and left him to die, the court was told.

Gu’s defense lawyer argued that Heywood bore some responsibility for his own death, and claimed that Gu was mentally unstable, with “less than normal” self-control, when she carried out the murder.

Gu, dressed in a white shirt and black pantsuit, made a brief statement admitting guilt and thanking the prosecutors for opening “the curtains a little bit to reveal hidden dirty secrets.”

“I committed a crime that brought negative consequences to the party and the country,” she said.

Four police officers she apparently implicated go on trial today for taking part in the coverup.

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