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July 28th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Despite being portrayed as an unstable, Lady Macbeth-like figure in the domestic press, Mrs Gu, like her husband, is still a scion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite as the daughter of a renowned PLA general.
Some legal experts have speculated that the maximum sentence she will receive is 15 years, leaving the prospect of her being released within a decade with good behaviour.
The possibility that Mrs Gu may receive a lenient punishment aside, it is her claims about Mr Heywood making threats over unknown business dealings that has left those who knew him reeling and no longer sure what to believe about the man whose death is at the centre of the biggest political scandal in China for two decades.
“For a foreigner to go through that, he must have known something that was dangerous to them,” said one neighbour of Mr Heywood in Beijing.
“If there was skulduggery on his part, then that does change the picture a bit,” said his former business colleague. “The thing is that none of us really know what he did.”
What is clear, though, is that Mr Heywood’s image as an affable ex-public schoolboy who drove around Beijing in a Jaguar with 007 number plates masked a rather more complex character. “The one thing all the people I know who were at Harrow with Neil say is that he was very bright,” said the businessman.
Those who lived close to him and his family wondered about Mr Heywood too.
“He bought his house off friends of mine. They turned up before the deal went through and expected to be allowed to stroll around it as if it was theirs already. Abrupt is one word for that, rude is another,” said the neighbour who, like Mr Heywood, is an old China hand whose wife is Chinese.
“They kept to themselves, which is rather strange. The expat community is so small and you expect to know the people who live in your compound, but most people hadn’t met them.”
Mrs Gu’s trial is expected to start on August 7 or 8 in Hefei in eastern Anhui Province. It is standard practise in China for high-profile cases to be tried in neutral locations, but Mrs Gu is sparing no effort to fight the charges.
The lawyer leading her defence is Jiang Min, chairman of the Anhui Lawyers Association and a vice-chairman of the All-China Lawyers Association. Many legal experts believe that Mrs Gu’s testimony that she felt Mr Heywood presented a danger to her and her son’s safety will be seen as a mitigating factor by the three judges who will try her case.
“The court will consider if Mr Heywood threatened them. If it is true that the victim has done something wrong, the court might take that into consideration and give a lighter punishment to the accused,” said Mo Shaoping, a prominent Beijing-based lawyer who defended the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
Nor is Mrs Gu standing trial alone. Also charged with Mr Heywood’s murder is the Bo family retainer Zhang Xiaojun, and there is speculation that he may be the one who will bear the brunt of the Chinese legal system’s wrath.
“Zhang and Gu are accomplices and both have been charged with intentional homicide so they will be sentenced for the same crime,” said Mr Mo. “But there is the possibility that the court might differentiate between the principal offender and the accessory.”
With Mrs Gu’s trial expected to be concluded within a month, her husband is likely to be charged soon after with corruption offences. The arrival of Patrick Devilliers, the French architect who was Mrs Gu’s former business partner, in China 12 days ago to be questioned by CCP officials about his business relationship with the Bo family is a signal that Mr Bo’s trial date is drawing close.
Now believed to be in Beijing, Mr Devilliers is thought to be the key to providing evidence of how Mr Bo and his wife squirreled away the billions from bribes and illegal business dealings they are alleged to have acquired during his time as mayor of the booming cities of Dalian and Chongqing.
There is little doubt that the CCP want both Mrs Gu’s trial and Mr Bo’s wrapped up before the all-important 18th Party Congress in the autumn, when China will go through a once-in-a-decade leadership handover. “It doesn’t make sense to leave Bo’s case for the next politburo to solve. They’ve already solved the case within the party; now they need to solve it outside the party,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing.
Until his dramatic fall, Mr Bo was a leading candidate for a position on the all-powerful nine-man politburo that acts as China’s cabinet. Both his removal from power and his wife’s trial are inextricably linked to the opaque internal politics of the CCP and the feuding factions within the party.
For that reason alone, few people expect the full truth about Mr Heywood’s grisly fate to emerge when Mrs Gu faces the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court next month. “I don’t think we’ll ever find out the true facts,” said his former neighbour. “The legal system here isn’t set up for that to happen and it’s just too sensitive.”
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