Meng, 49, boarded a direct flight to Shenzhen.
A few hours later, in the international diplomatic chessboard, China has moved a very heavy pawn, or rather two: the release of two Canadian citizens detained in China who are about to return to their homeland.
This is the former diplomat Michael Kovrig and the businessman Michael Spavor, arrested respectively in Beijing and Dandong on 10 December 2018, which have become the symbol of “hostage diplomacy“.
The action against the “two Michael” was motivated as the Chinese retaliation for the arrest of the financial director of the telecommunications giant Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, stopped on December 1, 2018 when she was in transit in Vancouver at the request of the United States, with the allegations of violation of US sanctions against Iran.
Kovrig, former Ottawa diplomat and later analyst, Spavor, entrepreneur and owner of the Paektu Cultural Exchange and among the few Westerners to have met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un several times, were accused before appropriation of state secrets in March 2019 and then formally sent to trial for espionage in June 2020 for “theft of sensitive information”. The hearings were held in March of this year, strictly behind closed doors, without the presence of Canadian diplomats who have complained over time of numerous violations to the procedures on consular assistance.
Last August, the sentence of 11 years in prison against Spavor matured, while the one against Kovrig never reached port: after more than 1,000 days of detention and thanks to the agreement signed by the US State Department and Meng for the fall of the charges and the extradition procedure, the two Michael’s left China for Canada.
They took a plane accompanied by the Canadian ambassador to Beijing, Dominic Barton. In recent weeks, presented as an exclusive, the Global Times, the nationalist tabloid of the People’s Daily, reported that the two Michael were found guilty of having collected photos and other material defined as “sensitive” for national security: Spavor, in the accusatory scheme, he would collect and then pass information to Kovrig.
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