Head of Interpol disappears; eyes turn toward China

BEIJING — When a highranking official in China’s public security system was elected president of Interpol in 2016, leaders in Beijing rejoiced. The promotion lent respectability to China’s notoriously opaque and arbitrary criminal justice system.

But now that same official, Meng Hongwei, 64, has himself mysteriously disappeared, after recently returning to China. Even the country’s most internationally prominent police officer, it seems, can vanish without an official murmur from Beijing.

No one seems to know where Mr. Meng is or why he suddenly disappeared, even though he leads an organization that serves as a kind of United Nations for the world’s police forces.

Interpol issued a cryptic statement Friday. His wife, who is living in France, where Interpol has its headquarters, reported him missing Thursday evening after she did not hear from him upon his arrival in China. French authorities have opened an investigation.

Even with so much unknown, questions are already arising about whether Mr. Meng is under investigation by Chinese authorities, and whether he was snatched away by security agents without notice. If so, his sudden and mysterious disappearance threatens to cloud China’s image, demonstrating that even the most prominent official of an international police organization is vulnerable

“If Meng Hongwei has disappeared in China, then of course the most likely reason is an anti-corruption investigation,” Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a Communist Party journal who now writes commentaries on Chinese politics, said in a telephone interview.

“Internationally, he is president of Interpol, but in the eyes of the Chinese authorities he is first of all Chinese, and they wouldn’t think too much about his international prominence,” Mr. Deng added. “This is the new normal.”

Chinese authorities had already sent an emphatic message earlier this week that international prominence was no shield for Chinese citizens.

This year, China established an anti-corruption investigation agency with wide powers to secretly detain officials suspected of wrongdoing.