A former university professor allegedly devised a “sham” animal experiment in Hong Kong to obtain lethal gas to murder his estranged wife by releasing it from a yoga ball inside her car nine years ago, a court retrial has heard.
Prosecutors said on Thursday that Malaysian Khaw Kim Sun, 60, was behind the “deliberate” and “calculated” killing of his wife Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their daughter Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16, who died after inhaling a lethal amount of carbon monoxide inside a yellow Mini Cooper on May 22, 2015.
Khaw, formerly an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a senior medical officer at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin, is facing a retrial at the High Court after winning an appeal against his conviction on the grounds that he did not receive a fair hearing initially.
On the second day of his opening remarks, Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Jonathan Man Tak-ho said former anaesthesiologist Khaw acquired carbon monoxide under the guise of experimenting on using oxygen to resuscitate rabbits poisoned with the gas.
A medical expert would be called in to testify that the research in question had “little scientific and clinical value”, Man said.
“The prosecution says it was a sham experiment for the purpose of getting the lethal gas, the carbon monoxide,” he told the jury of four men and three women.
