Slain Briton ‘held down and made to drink poison’

London Evening Standard/London

The British businessman found dead in China was forced to drink poison, according to new claims yesterday.Neil Heywood was allegedly held down and force-fed cyanide after the Old Harrovian threatened to reveal that senior Communist politician Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai had secreted £800mn of state assets.The 41-year-old consultant was found dead in a secluded hill-top hotel last November after being summoned to meet the couple. But the case only recently snowballed into a political scandal for Beijing after the attempted defection to America of a police chief.Yesterday a new report alleged Heywood was attacked at the hotel in Chongqing. A senior Communist Party official was quoted as saying: “They tried to poison Heywood with a drink, but he spat it out. The two people then forcibly held Heywood down, and poured the poison into his mouth.”It is not clear which two people are alleged to have held him down. At the time, a local coroner ruled he had died from “excessive alcohol”. However, questions started to emerge after Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, tried to defect in February.In a further twist, it was claimed yesterday that Wang retrieved the item spat out by Heywood and preserved it as evidence.“The item Heywood spat out was retrieved and stored by the deputy chief of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, and that has become a decisive piece of evidence,” said the official. “Wang Lijun has been applauded for co-operating in helping to unravel the truth in this incident.”The senior police officer recently turned against Bo, who was expected to be promoted to the politburo standing committee, which effectively runs China.Heywood met Bo and his wife in the Nineties, became a mentor to their son Bo Guagua, and helped him win a place at Harrow School. The businessman is then believed to have helped manage the family’s finances as Bo moved to jobs in Beijing then Chongqing.But he is said to have fallen out with the family in 2010 when they became paranoid over anti-corruption investigations into their finances.Heywood, who it is also claimed had an affair with Gu Kailai, is alleged to have been murdered after he threatened to expose her and demanded a larger slice of profits. Foreign Secretary William Hague has been asked to explain whether Heywood tipped off MI6 about his work as an adviser to the disgraced Chinese power couple.Yesterday, the Daily Yomiuri — Japan’s biggest-selling English newspaper — quoted a briefing given by a senior Chinese government source 10 days ago, just as the scandal broke.“A senior party official assembled his subordinates in a small conference room on April 10,” it read. “In an unusual move, attendees were ordered to turn off their cell phones and prohibited from taking notes.” The official then told how Heywood was allegedly held down while poisoned and described Bo as “the gangster of all gangsters”.Heywood left little savings: friendBusinessman Neil Heywood left his wife and children in a financially uncertain situation in China, prompting a former business associate to pay for their plane tickets to attend his London funeral, a family friend said. Heywood left his family yuan savings equivalent to a “five-digit” sum in pounds, the family friend said, raising the possibility that any financial dealings with Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, a former high-powered lawyer, may not have yielded him windfall profits. Police suspect that the 41-year-old Briton had been helping Gu move money offshore in return for a commission on the transaction, sources said earlier this week. But if such transactions did take place, and he made personal gains from it, Heywood’s widow Wang had no knowledge of them, according to the friend’s account. Wang and Heywood’s mother, Ann, and sister in London have turned down interview requests. “She doesn’t have a lot of bank savings,” the source said.