China says detained ex-Interpol chief being investigated for bribery
BEIJING — Chinese authorities scrambled Monday to contain a public relations mess over the disappearance of the former Interpol president during his trip home to China.
Officials said he was being lawfully investigated for bribery and other crimes.
But the government’s announcement did little to address concerns raised about the risks of appointing Chinese officials to leadership posts in international organizations.
On Monday, the acting Interpol president told The Associated Press the agency had not been informed in advance of the Chinese probe into Meng Hongwei, who is also China’s viceminister of public security.
On Sunday, Meng’s wife made a bold public appeal from France to the international community to help locate her husband.
The appeal cast an unwelcome light on extralegal detentions that have increasingly ensnared dissidents and allegedly corrupt or disloyal officials alike under President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian administration.
In a sign of the urgent and possibly unplanned nature of the investigation, the Ministry of Public Security said top ministry officials met in the early hours of Monday to discuss Meng’s case.
The announcement said Meng was being investigated for accepting bribes and other crimes that were a result of his “wilfulness.”
“We should deeply recognize the serious damage that Meng Hongwei’s bribe-taking and suspected violations of the law have caused the party and the cause of public security and deeply learn from this lesson,” said the announcement about the meeting, chaired by Minister Zhao Lezhi.
Meng is the latest high-ranking official to fall victim to a sweeping crackdown by the ruling Communist Party on graft and perceived disloyalty.
Most officials investigated by anti-graft authorities are quietly spirited away for questioning, cut off from contact from their families and not allowed access to lawyers, sometimes for months.
But that wasn’t how it played out with Meng, 64, whose unexplained disappearance while on a trip home to China late last month prompted the French police to launch an investigation.
The French government and Interpol also made their concerns known publicly in recent days.
By late Sunday night, China issued a terse announcement that Meng was in the custody of party investigators, and shortly after, Interpol said Meng had resigned as the international police agency’s president.
Meng could not be reached.
The revelation that Chinese authorities would be bold enough to forcibly make even a senior public security official with international stature disappear has cast a shadow over the image Beijing has sought to cultivate as a modern country with the rule of law.
Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said Meng’s case shows how Chinese officials have to obey the Communist Party first and foremost.
“This puts China’s internal political struggle over and above the international norms on the rule of law,” Lam said.