China's Communist Party has suspended former high-flying politician Bo Xilai from its top ranks and named his wife, Gu Kailai, a suspect in the murder of a British businessman.
The decision to banish Mr Bo from the Central Committee and its Politburo effectively ends the career of China's brashest and most controversial politician, who was widely seen as pressing for a top post in China's next leadership, to be settled later this year.
The official Xinhua news agency confirmed that Mr Bo had been suspended from his party posts, and separately reported that his wife is suspected in the murder of Briton Neil Heywood.
"Comrade Bo Xilai is suspected of being involved in serious disciplinary violations," the news agency said, citing a decision by the central party leadership to suspend Mr Bo from its top ranks.
"Police set up a team to reinvestigate the case of the British national Neil Heywood who was found dead in Chongqing," Xinhua said, referring to the sprawling southwestern municipality where Mr Bo was party chief until he was dismissed in March as a scandal surrounding him unfolded.
"According to the reinvestigation results, the existing evidence indicates Heywood died of homicide, of which Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun, an assistant in Bo's household, are highly suspected," said the news agency, citing a dispute over unspecified "economic interests" between Ms Gu and Mr Heywood.
The Central Committee is a council of about 200 full members that meets about once a year and the Politburo is a more powerful body of about two dozen Central Committee members.
The announcements are the latest turn in the growing scandal over Mr Bo and his family that erupted after his vice mayor, Wang Lijun, fled into a US consulate for 24 hours in February, alleging that Ms Gu was involved in Heywood's death.
"This is so dramatic, so extraordinary," said Li Zhuang, a Beijing lawyer who was once jailed in Chongqing for challenging Mr Bo's campaign against organised crime.
"If, and I stress if, there are real proven links to Heywood's death, then we can imagine that Gu and Bo Xilai will find out that, as Chinese television has said about this, nobody is above the law."
Any criminal investigation of Bo would usually only begin after the party's disciplinary agency investigated him and decided whether to turn his case over to police and prosecutors, said Mr Li.
"This means that Bo's political career is effectively over," Chen Ziming, an independent political scholar in Beijing, said before the announcement, citing rumours of Bo's suspension.
The decision does not mean Mr Bo has been expelled from the Communist Party.
Unlike past removals of defiant leaders over corruption charges, Mr Bo's downfall has been tinged by ideological tension and sparked open opposition from leftist sympathisers who have insisted he is the victim of a plot.
Residents of his former power base, Chongqing, were shocked on hearing the news, said Zhang Mingyu, a businessman in the city who has accused Mr Bo of using his crackdown on organised crime to stifle critics and legitimate business.
"In Chongqing, everybody is up and discussing this and waiting for more news," Mr Zhang told Reuters. "The ordinary residents are staggered. Many didn't think the rumours could be true. They want to know what the hell has been going on."
China's censors worked hard to stifle chatter about the scandal, blocking sensitive words on microblogging sites, including "Chongqing". But many users skirted the restrictions and discussed Mr Bo's fate with a mixture of innuendo and word play.
"What on earth were you evil-doers left over from the Cultural Revolution thinking!" wrote Weibo user Ling Tiaojue.
Mr Bo promoted a Mao Zedong-inspired "red" culture in Chongqing and a harsh crackdown on organised crime, prompting fears among some people of a return to methods seen during the chaotic Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Reuters