Dr. Xiangguo Qiu tasked in PRC "biological intelligence collection mission"

Former U.S. State Department lead investigator says Dr. Qiu's WIV collaborators systematically performing bat virus biosynthesis and "illicitly acquiring Ebola ... to make it super contagious"

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

It was a few degrees above zero in Winnipeg on October 12, 2018 at 5:41 p.m.

Inside the National Microbiology Laboratory Dr. Xiangguo Qiu’s research partner, a senior Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) technician, walked towards the X-Ray gate.

The WIV technician was carrying ten vials capped with green lids from Dr. Qiu’s lab.

His specialty was bio-synthesis — manipulating genes in bat coronaviruses and injecting mice and Guinea pigs to create new more contagious strains of Ebola.

Walking with the WIV technician were three “restricted visitors” including Feihu Yan, a buzz-cut, sinewy, doctoral student from the Institute of Military Veterinary Medicine in Jilin, a northern area of China closer to Pyongyang than Beijing.

These Chinese students and the Wuhan technician tried to walk through the X-Ray gate with Dr. Qiu’s lab vials, but a security guard stopped them, saying the tubes could only leave Canada’s highest security infectious disease lab through shipping and receiving.

Dr. Qiu’s husband Keding Cheng, who also conducted research with the Institute of Military Veterinary Medicine, had buzzed these students into the Winnipeg Lab earlier.

About 6 p.m. he returned with his pass-card to let them out.

And another Chinese scientist returned the ten test tubes to Dr. Qiu’s lab-room, according to security camera footage.

It could be a scene from Contagion, the Hollywood thriller about scientists racing to save humanity from a highly contagious viral outbreak.

But in reality, Dr. Qiu and the Chinese researchers she injected into the Winnipeg Lab would more likely be scientific villains, covertly meddling with Ebola and bat-borne pathogens including Nipah, to benefit China’s biological weapon and vaccine production teams.

The Bureau has puzzled together available facts on Dr. Qiu’s intelligence network by comparing fragmented information in over 600 pages of redacted Canadian investigation and intelligence documents with academic, Chinese and U.S. government records, filling in the gaps by interviewing U.S. and Canadian investigators.

One of these experts, Dr. David Asher, led the U.S. State Department’s 2021 investigation into probable causes of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Asher, who has worked with the CIA and DEA tracking terrorists, spies and cartel kingpins, followed shadowy money trails into Wuhan and probed whether China has secretly breached international Biological Weapons Convention obligations.

Asher cannot discuss the high-level, classified intelligence his team used to reach their damning conclusions. But he can share his assessment, which is the same as the FBI’s and a growing number of Western intelligence agencies.

On a balance of probabilities, they believe available evidence suggests lab accidents and shoddy practices inside WIV likely triggered the Coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 15 million worldwide.

Perhaps more damaging to Justin Trudeau’s administration, Asher told The Bureau his State Department team had significant concerns that Beijing was using the Winnipeg Lab for People’s Liberation Army intelligence collection and bioweapon research projects.

“The WIV wasn’t just a government lab creating novel pathogens — it was and is a civil-military fusion hub that had a biological intelligence operational collection mission ensconced in its web of nefarious activities,” Asher said, including “illicitly acquiring Ebola and doing research on bio-synthesis of this massively deadly pathogen, to make it super contagious.”

Asher’s State Department teams also found that prior to the 2019 pandemic, Wuhan Institute researchers systematically experimented on bat coronaviruses with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology.

These are the same elite People’s Liberation Army bioweapon research units that Dr. Qiu and Keding Cheng were covertly working with on Ebola and synthetic bat coronavirus projects that started in January 2019 at the Wuhan Institute, CSIS records show.

A confidential Canadian intelligence source told The Bureau they agreed with Dr. Asher’s assessment, that Wuhan Institute of Virology was secretly conducting deadly research, and Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her team in Winnipeg were directly involved.

This explosive information — much of which can now be documented after Trudeau’s government was forced to disclose redacted CSIS investigation files — puts the lie to the Prime Minister’s and Health Minister Mark Holland’s recent comments that minimized the seriousness of China’s clandestine operations inside National Microbiology Laboratory.

"At no time did national secrets, or information that threatened the security of Canada, leave or enter the lab," Holland told reporters, while claiming that security breaches at National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) were limited to 2019.

On the contrary, analysis of partial disclosures from CSIS’s “Canadian Eyes Only” documents suggests the People’s Liberation Army’s most senior biological weapon research agents took significant control of Canada’s infectious disease and vaccine production systems from at least 2013, in operations coordinated from the highest levels in Beijing.

And this directly leads to several high-priority Chinese military biotechnology projects headed by Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, WIV deputy director Dr. SHI Zhengli and also the senior WIV technician who was caught trying to remove ten test tubes from NML in October 2018.

The Bureau’s analysis of redacted CSIS documents suggests Dr. Shi – the so-called “bat-woman” who collaborated in 2015 with controversial U.S. bat virus researchers – is referred to as “Individual 1” in the national security probe of Dr. Qiu and her husband, who were ejected from the Winnipeg Lab in the summer of 2019.

What was contained in the ten vials the WIV technician known as “Individual 2” tried to take from the Winnipeg Lab in October 2018 can’t be confirmed.

But China’s relentless efforts to appropriate Canada’s scientific capacity eventually succeeded.

In March 2019, Dr. Qiu and a second Winnipeg Lab scientist that had previously collaborated with Chinese military researchers on Ebola, sent Nipah and Ebola and mice and guinea-pig adapted viruses from the Winnipeg Lab to Wuhan Institute of Virology, redacted emails show.

The controversial conclusion that Wuhan Institute researchers including Dr. Shi Zhengli led dangerous gain-of-function (GofF) experiments in collaboration  with Dr. Qiu on various projects, and something went wrong in the Wuhan lab, infecting several scientists in fall 2019 with Covid-19 like symptoms, is not unanimous in declassified Western intelligence. 

And during 2020 and 2021, speculation that lab accidents in Wuhan likely caused the Coronavirus pandemic was widely viewed as conspiracy theory and misinformation.

But the scientific plausibility of this theory is increasingly considered worthy of examination.

“The natural or accidental origin of SARS-CoV2 remains an unsolved conundrum,” says a 2023 paper by French microbiologist Patrick Berche called GoF and origins of Covid-19.

“But sooner or later, the truth will emerge.”

Dr. Qiu and her husband Dr. Cheng were ejected from the Winnipeg Lab in August 2019 and later faced CSIS and RCMP investigations.

They could not be reached by The Bureau for comment on this story. The Globe and Mail has reported that Dr. Qiu is currently working in China with military scientists. There is no explanation why RCMP national security charges haven’t resulted against Dr. Qiu and Dr. Cheng, given the seriousness of the intelligence allegations made by CSIS.

The Players

By comparing CSIS documents redacted in Canadian Parliamentary legal procedures with related scientific research papers and Chinese state documents, The Bureau can identify a tight circle of alleged co-conspirators and People’s Republic intelligence and bioweapon research entities including Chinese Academy of Sciences, Academy of Military Medical Sciences and Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology.

This exclusive investigation shows that CSIS probed a suspected Chinese military intelligence conspiracy involving  Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, Keding Cheng, Dr. Shi Zhengli, and senior Chinese officials involved in Ebola and Coronavirus research, the coronavirus pandemic response and Chinese vaccine production.

The players identified by CSIS include Major General CHEN Wei and CanSino Biologics, a People’s Liberation Army scientific unit that for inexplicable reasons, has been working with Canadian scientists since 2013, including on a botched Coronavirus vaccine collaboration. 

Former Chinese Centre for Disease Control director George F. Gao, a suave, Oxford-educated virologist who was instrumental in China’s pandemic response, was also a longtime collaborator with Dr. Qiu’s network.

He is only identified as “Individual 24” in the redacted CSIS documents, The Bureau’s analysis suggests.

Another key player in CSIS’s probe was Wuhan Institute Director WANG Yanyi, a United States-educated researcher with significant leadership in China’s united front system, according to Chinese-language records. 

Other Jilin-based actors identified in CSIS documents include former People’s Liberation Army General XIA Xianzhu and “Individual 17” – a shadowy researcher named YANG Songtao who has multiple identities according to CSIS.

According to the information that can be discerned from CSIS’s redacted documents, these people and their relationships to China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) are key to understanding how Dr. Qiu’s network exploited Canada’s scientific capacity to empower the People’s Liberation Army. 

“Online information states AMMS is the highest medical research institution of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and has offensive Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) capabilities,” the records say.