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The wife of a disgraced top Chinese politician was a depressed woman on medication but a willful murderer who poisoned a British businessman while in fear for her son's life, official media said Friday in what appeared to be a prelude to her conviction and punishment after a seven-hour trial.
The official Xinhua News Agency -- in a 3,400-word report that was its most detailed accounting of the scandal that has shaken the country's leadership -- said Gu Kailai and her co-defendant "confessed to intentional murder" in the death of her business associate Neil Heywood last November.
It said evidence showed she used cyanide to poison him in a Chongqing hotel room but also describes her as depressed and fearful that Heywood would harm her family -- factors that may bring leniency in her sentence.
Gu's arrest and the ouster of her husband Bo Xilai, the Communist Party boss of Chongqing until March, sparked the biggest political turbulence in China since the putdown of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Her tightly orchestrated trial was a step toward resolving the scandal before the party's once-a-decade leadership transition this fall.
The court in Hefei in eastern China's Anhui province that heard her speedy trial on Thursday said a verdict against Gu and the family aide accused as an accomplice would be delivered later. Their trial was followed Friday by the trial of four senior Chongqing police officers accused of helping Gu cover up the crime.
Xinhua said Gu accepted all the facts in the indictment and was ready to accept her punishment, saying: "The tragedy which was created by me was not only extended to Neil, but also to several families."
Gu said Heywood wrote a letter of self-introduction in about 2005 when her son Bo Guagua was studying in Britain. They then got involved in a land project that never got off the ground. According to Xinhua, she said Heywood later got into a dispute with her and her son over payment and other issues and she "believed Heywood had threatened the personal safety of her son and decided to kill Heywood."
It said that according to testimony that prosecutors presented in court, Gu said: "To me, that was more than a threat. It was real action that was taking place. I must fight to my death to stop the craziness of Neil Heywood."
The report did not detail any alleged threats or say why the murder then took place seven years later when Bo Guagua was a graduate student at Harvard. The court was presented with emails between him and Heywood showing how their dispute escalated, Xinhua said, without detailing the contents.
Xinhua said that family aide Zhang Xiaojun had also confessed and said "sorry" to the relatives of Heywood.
