The dubious death of a provincial level party official from the Ningxia Hui autonomous region remained unclear yesterday.

Staff at a Peking University hotel found a dead man lying in blood on Tuesday, according to yesterday's reports from the Beijing News.

The body was yesterday identified as 48-year-old Zhao Xianchun, vice-head of Ningxia's organization department, a Party institution that organizes personnel throughout the region's government as well as in industry.

The official was said to have committed suicide Monday morning using broken glass to slit his wrists, according to the Beijing News and Caijing Magazine website.

However, Beijing police yesterday insisted it was too early to define the case as suicide.

"So far preliminary investigations have only concluded that the official was not murdered," said Dong Rui, press officer of Haidian district police, which was the first authority on the scene.

"We did not have a conclusion of suicide yet," he told METRO yesterday, dismissing reports of the official using broken glass.

While investigations are still ongoing, another senior Party official from Ningxia who knew Zhao personally said preliminary probes showed Zhao died from gastrointestinal bleeding.

"The information we have is that Zhao definitely did not kill himself," said the official, who spoke on conditions of anonymity.

"He died from gastrointestinal bleeding, a sad result of a prolonged illness with his stomach."

Medical experts said patients have a 10 percent chance of death when excessive drinking causes gastrointestinal bleeding.

But Beijing police declined to confirm this cause of death.

A special team of investigators from Ningxia government has been reportedly in Beijing since Tuesday to look into the official's death with local authorities.

Zhao was found dead in his room at the four-star Zhongguanyuan Global Village affiliated to the Peking University in west Beijing. METRO was not able to find information on the whereabouts of the official before his death as of the time of press yesterday.

Zhao, a Shandong native and Party member, obtained his most recent post earlier last year after serving as an official in Ningxia since 1984. Before his death, he had supervised the party-related affairs in higher education institutions in Ningxia.