Neil Heywood, Gu Kailai | featured news

A BRITISH businessman whose murder triggered China's biggest political scandal in decades had been informing MI6 of the private affairs of one of the most powerful families in the Communist Party in the last year of his life.

The murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood, is still seen as stemming from a financial dispute, but the intelligence links add an enticing subplot to his death.

A former police chief at the center of a major China political scandal admitted attempting to defect to the United States, and did not contest charges of bribery and illegal surveillance at his trial on Tuesday, a court official said.

Gu Kailai, the wife of ousted Communist Party official Bo Xilai, was found guilty and given a suspended death sentence on Monday for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, according to the Associated Press.

The one-day murder trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai, concluded with prosecutors telling the court that she slipped poison into a glass of water to kill British businessman Neil Heywood after he got drunk. Gu killed Heywood, they argued, because he threatened the security of her Harvard University son.

The son of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai says he is confident the "facts will speak for themselves" when his mother stands trial for murder Thursday in the country's most sensational political scandal in decades.

Is it possible for the butler, who hasn't met with his lawyer yet, to get a fair trial in the poisoning of Neil Heywood, associate of political wife Gu Kailai? The lawyer for one of the defendants in China's most sensational murder case is emphatic: The butler did not do it.

Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced political leader Bo Xilai, has been indicted for intentional homicide, in a crime that has triggered China’s most serious political crisis in decades. The official Xinhua news agency on Thursday evening published a brief dispatch announcing that Ms. Gu and an aide employed by the family had been formally charged in the poisoning death of the Briton, Neil Heywood, 41, whose body was found last November in a hotel in Chongqing, the sprawling municipality Mr. Bo led until his downfall.

Friends and foes say Gu Kailai, the high-profile suspect in Neil Heywood's death in Chongqing, deserves an open trial that follows the rule of law. The country's most famous murder suspect may have laid bare divisions in Chinese society, but friends and foes alike are united in their demand that her trial be a test case for justice in a system notorious for secrecy and flouting of the rule of law.