China’s former Interpol chief Meng pleads guilty to bribery
FORMER Interpol chief Meng Hongwei pleaded guilty at a trial in China on Thursday to accepting $2.1 million in bribes – a remarkable fall from grace for the former vice minister of public security.
The Tianjin No1 Intermediate Court said Meng “showed repentance” during the hearing, which was the culmination of a dramatic case that shook the international police organisation and put a spotlight on China’s opaque judicial system.
The verdict will be announced at a “select date or time”, said court i n northern China in a statement, without specif y ing f urt her.
Photos released by the Tianjin court showed Meng, who disappeared last year, sitting between two police officers in the courtroom, wearing a light brown jacket.
His hair had greyed and he appeared gaunt compared to photos from 2017.
Meng is among a growing group of Communist Party cadres caught in President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign, which critics say has served as a way to remove the leader’s political enemies.
Over one million officials have been punished so far during Xi’s six-year tenure.
‘Poisonous influence’
Meng vanished last September during a visit to China from France, where Interpol is based, and was later accused of accepting bribes and expelled from the Communist Party.
The court said that bet ween 2005 and 2017 Meng used his status and positions, including as v ice minister of public securit y and Marine Police Chief, to accumulate bribes equiva lent to some 14.46 million y uan ($2.1 million).
As vice security minister, Meng oversaw a number of sensitive portfolios, including the country’s counter-terrorism division, and he was in charge of the response to violence in China’s fractious northwestern region of Xinjiang.
During Meng’s tenure, China’s public securit y bureau a lso arrested and interrogated a number of prominent Chinese dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned and died of liver cancer while under police custody in 2017.
At Interpol, Meng was expected to ser ve a four-year term until 2020. His election in 2016 had raised concerns among human rights groups which feared t hat Beijing would use t he organisation to round up Chinese dissidents overseas.
But since his expulsion from the Communist Party, China’s powerful Public Security Ministry has sought to distance itself from Meng.
In March, the ministry said that Meng’s “poisonous influence” had to be “thoroughly eliminated”, and that it was investigating other party cadres involved in Meng’s case.
The former Interpol chief’s wife Grace Meng and t heir t wo children are still in France, where they were granted politica l asylum in May.
In French media inter v iews, she has said she fears for her life, and was afraid she and her children would be the targets of k idnapping attempts.