Locustland | China's top female forensic doctor rejects official cause of Heywood death
In a long blog post published on Wednesday, Wang Xuemei, one of China's top forensic doctors dismisses the official cause of Neil Heywood's death last year.
"A serious lack of evidence exists," Wang writes, "to conclude that Neil Heywood died of cyanide poisoning, as well as any supporting scientific basis."
"What I find extremely terrifying," she continues, is that missing in both the secret recording of Gu's confession to the murder and the court testimony provided by Gu and Zhang themselves, she claims, is any indication that Gu and Zhang witnessed a death that involved the characteristics of cyanide poisoning: the scream reflex that occurs during "lightning-fast" asphyxia, body spasms which would have been apparent as the cyanide reached Heywood's central nervous system, stupour that would have followed, or eventual cardiopulmonary arrest just prior to his death.
"As everyone knows, hemiglobincyanide will form in the corpse of someone poisoned with cyanide, giving both their hypostasis and blood an unusually bright red colour...Any forensic doctor in China would have immediately spotted something that out of the ordinary."
Local forensic officers, she alleges, either didn't do a toxicology screening - which includes the very easy test for cyanide as standard practice - before Heywood's body was cremated, but in all likelihood did conduct one and found no trace of cyanide and are complicit in covering up his true cause of death.