Fast-Paced Trial in China Murder Leaves Shadows

HEFEI, China — Worried that a longtime friend and business associate might harm her only child, Gu Kailai lured him to a rented villa in southwest China, plied him with alcohol until he could take no more and then, when he began to vomit and requested a drink of water, poured a poisonous concoction into his mouth.

That, at least, is the prosecution’s version of what happened in a scandal that has riveted many in China and outside the country for months, presented in a neatly packaged capstone after a murder trial on Thursday that lasted, with a break for lunch, less than seven hours. Ms. Gu, the wife of the ousted party leader Bo Xilai, was said to have confessed to the murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood. Her state-appointed defense lawyers asked for leniency.

“The criminal facts are clear; the evidence is solid,” a court official said after the trial here in the provincial capital of Anhui Province, more than 800 miles from the scene of the crime in Chongqing. The formal guilty verdict will be announced at a later date.

Communist Party leaders clearly hoped the proceedings, which were closed to the foreign news media and shown on television only in carefully packaged snippets, would provide the Chinese public with a captivating spectacle that would distract attention from the political scandal surrounding Ms. Gu’s husband, a populist leader who left a trail of corruption and abuse of power that deeply unnerved many of his fellow Politburo members. But if they hoped the trial would also showcase a more transparent, by-the-books legal system, they are likely to be disappointed.

Ms. Gu and her accomplice, Zhang Xiaojun, were deprived of their own legal counsel and forced to accept a government-appointed lawyer. No defense witnesses were produced during the trial. The defendants’ lawyers never had a chance to review the prosecution’s evidence.

In a bitter twist of fate, Ms. Gu, herself a lawyer, once expressed an unshakable faith in her nation’s legal system. In a book she wrote after visiting the United States in 1998 and successfully representing a Chinese company in a civil trial, she ridiculed the American justice system as doddering and inept. “They can level charges against dogs and a court can even convict a husband of raping his wife,” she wrote.

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