Bo Xilai's wife arrested for Briton's murder

The wife of Bo Xilai, one of China's most powerful Communist party leaders, has been arrested for the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman.

Heywood, 41, who was based in Beijing, was found dead last November in a hotel room in Chongqing, the city ruled over by Bo and his wife.

On Tuesday, the Chinese government said a fresh investigation into his death is under way, and that the existing evidence strongly points to Gu Kailai, Bo's 53-year-old second wife, and Zhang Xiaojun, "an orderly at Bo's home".

The pair have been "transferred to judicial authorities on suspected crime of intentional homicide", said a statement on Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. The maximum penalty for murder in China is death. A separate statement said Bo, 62, had been suspended from the Politburo and from the Central Committee and is under investigation for "serious discipline violations", spelling the end of his political career.

Neither Bo nor his wife have been seen since mid-March. An editorial in the People's Daily, the newspaper that the Communist party uses to communicate to its cadres throughout the country, said Heywood's death was a "serious criminal case" and that "Bo Xilai's actions have seriously violated the party's discipline, caused damage to the party and to the country, and harmed the image of the party and the country".

A motive for killing Heywood was not spelt out, but Xinhua said that Gu, her husband, and their son, Bo Guagua, had been on "good terms" with the businessman but that a "conflict over economic interests" had arisen.

The statement also said that the crime had been brought to light by Wang Lijun, the former police chief in the city.

Wang fled from Chongqing to the US Consulate in neighbouring Chengdu earlier this year, apparently in fear for his safety. While inside the US consulate, he accused Gu of poisoning Heywood, prompting the Foreign Office to urge the Chinese authorities to reopen the case.

According to the New York Times, Wang provided American diplomats with "a technical police file" on Heywood's death, as well as divulging a "trove of knowledge on the contest for power among the Chinese leadership".

At the time of his death, Heywood's family was told there would be no investigation or autopsy and that he had died of a heart attack. His father, Peter, died of heart disease aged 63. The British embassy, however, was told Heywood had died of excessive alcohol consumption, a detail that puzzled his friends, who said he rarely drank.

Heywood, whose consultancy business helped to introduce Western companies to China, had become friends with Bo and his wife in the 1990s, when Bo was the mayor of Dalian. Some sources claim that, as an Old Harrovian, he helped ease Bo Guagua into Harrow school.

However, Tom Reed, who dined with Heywood in Beijing a few days before his death, said he had never discussed his relationship with Gu. Reed said that at the time of his death, Heywood had not been in touch with the Bo family for at least a year. A second source, who knew Heywood from his time in Dalian, said that he thought his relationship with the Bo family had "cooled" since Bo took over in Chongqing in 2007.

According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Gu had become "increasingly neurotic" after being investigated for corruption in 2007 and had at one point demanded that Heywood, as a member of her inner circle, divorce his wife and swear an oath of loyalty.

Heywood refused. Like Bo, whose father was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist party, Gu was part of the party's aristocracy. Her father was Gu Jingsheng, a general. In her early career, Gu was one of China's most famous lawyers. And while Bo has suggested that "she now basically just stays at home, doing some housework", she is believed to still have had control of her law firm. Companies wishing to do business in Chongqing were well advised to retain her firm's services.