Ueno Zoo's dearly departed giant panda Ling Ling may have been sacrificed at the hands of an assassin for a chance to strengthen ties between Japan and China, Shukan Shincho (5/15) bizarrely claims.

The timing of the 22-year-old panda's death on April 30 was just too good to be accidental, and looks almost orchestrated considering it came a week before Chinese President Hu Jintao became the first Chinese leader to visit Tokyo in a decade, the weekly opines.

Late and lamented Ling Ling's leaving also happened to leave the capital's main zoo without a panda for the first time in 36 years.

And the conspiracy theory argument goes that the panda's passing provided Hu with the opportunity to "magnanimously" offer up a couple of the rare and popular animals to the main zoo in Tokyo -- capital of a Japan increasingly angry at China for its shoddy human rights record, shonky products and increasingly dodgy food supplies.

Many wonder whether the panda's passing truly was the result of natural causes.

"There's something fishy going on," Masanori Mizuma, a modern history researcher, tells Shukan Shincho. "OK, so in human terms the panda was the equivalent of someone over 70. Still, as far as I could tell on TV the day before he died, it certainly didn’t look as though he was knocking at death's door. And neither a keeper nor a vet was around at the moment he died. I think somebody could have been playing funny buggers, and I wouldn't be surprised if the panda was assassinated. The panda should have a proper autopsy and its precise cause of death found out."

The men's weekly goes into detail describing how the panda enclosure at Ueno Zoo is surrounded by glass, but there are gaps where somebody could sneak in and get close enough to the animal to cause harm. A keeper confirms that security around Ling Ling was hardly the most stringent.

"Ling Ling really took a turn for the worse from around mid-April. But that came after about two years of gradually growing weaker and weaker, a condition both keepers and vets attributed to aging," the keeper tells Shukan Shincho. "People kept an eye on Ling Ling, but didn't go as far as constant surveillance. And nobody monitored the panda enclosure cameras at night. What that all means is that whenever Ling Ling's keepers were off duty, there was nobody ever keeping watch over the panda."

Regardless of whether or not Ling Ling really was done in for diplomacy, researcher Mizuma says the panda should be a symbol of people's anger toward China.

"Giant pandas are originally from Tibet. People all over the world should look at the pandas and think about the tragedy of Tibet," he tells Shukan Shincho. "People should protest China's use of a diplomatic tool for political purposes." (By Ryann Connell)