Diplomats Visit Held Frenchman In China

 July 24, 2012
By GERALDINE AMIEL in Paris and JEREMY PAGE in Beijing

A French architect embroiled in the political scandal surrounding Bo Xilai, the ousted Communist Party leader, has met French diplomats in China and is being kept in "good" conditions, according to the French Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Patrick Henri Devillers was taken into custody after flying to China last Tuesday to cooperate with an investigation into Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, following the Frenchman's release from detention in Cambodia.
"Mr. Devillers met Saturday with representatives of the French Embassy in Beijing. He's fine and the conditions of his stay, provided by the Chinese authorities with which he willingly committed to cooperate, are good," said Bernard Valero, a spokesman for the French Foreign Affairs Ministry.

French authorities have made a request to Chinese officials that Mr. Devillers gets a lawyer, but don't know if he has one yet, Mr. Valero said. He declined to give further details of Mr. Devillers's situation.
The architect's situation is troubling for the French government because China has no independent judiciary and a long track record of using extrajudicial detention in politically sensitive cases, according to diplomats following the case.

Cambodia's information minister, Khieu Kanharith, said Friday that Mr. Devillers would be held in China for 60 days and then released if he wasn't found to have been involved in any crime. Another person familiar with the matter said Friday that Mr. Devillers hadn't been officially detained, but was being held under guard by Chinese authorities.

China's Foreign Ministry and Public Security Ministry didn't respond to requests for comment.
It wasn't possible to contact Mr. Devillers, but Cambodia's national police posted a video interview with him on its website last week in which he said he was returning to China voluntarily to cooperate with the investigation into Ms. Gu.

Mr. Devillers, who hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, had close personal and business ties for several years with Ms. Gu, after getting to know her in the northeastern city of Dalian where Mr. Bo was mayor in the 1990s.

The Chinese government announced in April that Mr. Bo had been sacked from his party posts while Ms. Gu was in custody as a murder suspect in the death of Neil Heywood, a British business consultant. Neither Mr. Bo nor Ms. Gu have commented publicly on the allegations.

Ms. Gu and Mr. Devillers were both consulting partners for a company that advised businesses investing in Dalian and elsewhere in China in the 1990s, according to that firm's publicity material.

The Frenchman also shared a residential address with Ms. Gu in the southern British city of Bournemouth between 2000 and 2003, according to British public records.

Mr. Devillers, who is about 52 years old and has been living in Cambodia for several years, was detained by police there on June 13 in response to an extradition request from China, according to Cambodian officials. There has been no public comment on the matter from Beijing.

Cambodian authorities said in late June they wouldn't extradite him, following expressions of concern from France. They then announced last week that he had been released without charge—at Beijing's request—and had flown to China.