Meng Hongwei: Ex-Interpol president under investigation for bribery and 'wilfulness', China says

Meng Hongwei, the missing former Interpol chief, is under investigation for bribery and other offences in China, government authorities there said.

China’s Ministry of Public Security suggested that political sins may have been behind Mr Meng’s detention, saying he was being investigated due to his own “wilfulness and for bringing trouble upon himself”.

“The investigation against Meng Hongwei’s taking bribes and suspected violations of law is very timely, absolutely correct and rather wise,” the ministry said in a statement following an internal meeting.

Beijing’s Communist Party watchdog for political graft and disloyalty announced only on Sunday that Mr Meng – a vice minister of public security in China – was under investigation.

China’s new anti-corruption body, the National Supervisory Commission, is conducting the probe, the watchdog added on Sunday.

Mr Meng, who apparently tendered his resignation on the same day, had gone missing late last month. The last message he sent his wife on 25 September was a knife emoji, Grace Meng told reporters in Lyon, France, where the couple lived and Interpol has its headquarters.

On Sunday the police coordination body said its general secretariat and national bureaus “remained focused on their mission to help law enforcement officers across the world secure their borders, protect their citizens, prevent and investigate crime, and enhance global police cooperation”.

French authorities had been investigating the disappearance, working on the assumption that Mr Meng had been detained by Beijing, before the fact of his arrest was confirmed.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has led a wide-ranging crackdown on alleged corruption in recent years as he consolidated his position at the top of the country’s power structure. Mr Meng is the latest high-ranking official to have been swept up.

In a sign of how seriously the authorities regard the case, public security minister Zhao Lezhi chaired a meeting in the early hours of Monday morning with senior officials of the ministry’s party committee to discuss it, according to a statement.

The ministry’s statement gave no details of Mr Meng’s alleged crimes or political lapses.

But it indicated that Mr Meng, a longstanding member of the Communist Party, may have somehow been tainted by the former security chief and ex-Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang who is now serving a life sentence for corruption.

“We should resolutely oppose corruption and resolutely eliminate the pernicious influence of Zhou Yongkang,” it said.

Mr Meng’s various jobs likely put him in close contact with Zhou and other Chinese leaders in the security establishment, an area long synonymous with human rights abuses, corruption and opacity.

Zhou and other senior figures prosecuted in Mr Xi’s crackdown were mostly convicted of corruption but officials have since also said they were accused of “conspiring openly to usurp party leadership”.

At Monday’s meeting, officials were told that they “must always maintain the political quality of being absolutely loyal to the party”, the ministry statement said.

Additional reporting by agencies