A yoga ball brought in for evidence. The accused has denied filling a yoga ball with carbon monoxide and placing it inside the family’s yellow Mini Cooper to kill his wife and daughter. - Photo: Dickson Lee/SCMP
HONG KONG: A former university professor brought two yoga balls filled with lethal gas to his Hong Kong home to exterminate shrews that had been attracted by the smell of Spanish ham, a court has heard in the trial over the alleged murder of his wife and daughter.
Anaesthesiologist Khaw Kim Sun, 60, told the High Court on Wednesday that he decided to bring the surplus carbon monoxide from his laboratory back to their three-storey Sai Kung home after he had tried various pest control methods in vain.
The Malaysian, representing himself in the retrial, has denied filling an inflatable yoga ball with carbon monoxide and placing it inside the family’s yellow Mini Cooper to kill his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, and second daughter, Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16.
The pair died in the car on May 22, 2015.
“There is no reason for me to sit here trying to defend myself if I am not innocent,” the former university professor told the jury.
He also said the timeline of his whereabouts on the day of the deaths, and other scientific evidence, would prove him to be not guilty.
Opening the retrial on Wednesday, Deputy High Court Judge Brian Keith briefed the jury, comprising four men and three women, before the prosecution began its opening arguments.
The prosecution said that on the day of the incident, Khaw’s wife and daughter were leaving home in the Mini Cooper. Their car was found near the Sai O bus terminal in Ma On Shan, around 1.6 kilometres from their home.
A passer-by called police, who smashed the car’s windows in an attempt to save the pair. They were certified dead at a hospital, the prosecution said.
Only months later did police discover a deflated exercise ball in the car that had been pumped with carbon monoxide, the same substance found in the mother and daughter’s autopsies. Khaw, an anaesthesiologist who would have known the properties of carbon monoxide, had committed the “perfect crime,” the prosecution added.
The retrial is expected to last 30 days.
During the initial trial, which captured local and international headlines, the court heard that Khaw had an extramarital affair with a woman who tutored Chinese to the couple’s children. Khaw’s eldest daughter testified that she was aware of the affair.
Regarding the carbon monoxide allegations, Khaw had said that he filled the ball with the gas at a laboratory at his university and brought it home to kill mice in their village house.
The Malaysian ex-university professor in Hong Kong has rejected prosecutors’ claims that an animal experiment he was carrying out with carbon monoxide was merely a ruse to obtain the deadly gas that killed them nine years ago via a yoga ball.
Anesthesiologist Khaw Kim Sun, 60, made the remarks at the High Court last Friday after dismissing his legal counsel and opting to defend himself in the remainder of his murder retrial.
“Dr Khaw thinks that the best interest lies in him representing himself,” Deputy Judge Brian Keith told the jury.
“He’s given a lot of thought to that, and I have therefore given permission to his legal team to withdraw from the case.”
The former Chinese University of Hong Kong associate professor allegedly placed an inflatable yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide inside the family’s yellow Mini Cooper to kill his wife knowing she would use it to take two of their four children home from school.
He was said to have mistakenly killed his second daughter Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16, whom he did not realise was with her mother at the time.
As stated previously, Khaw, a trained anaesthesiologist, was found guilty of killing his wife and second daughter by poisoning them with a yoga ball he had filled with carbon monoxide, after the lethal gas had leaked out of the ball placed in a Mini Cooper his estranged wife drove.
The two, wife Wong Siew Wing, 47, and daughter, Lily Khaw, 16, were found unconscious in the car on May 22, 2015, and pronounced dead on the same day.
In a judgment released on Nov 21, five top appeal court judges ruled unanimously in favour of Khaw and his lawyers who raised questions concerning the trial judge’s directing of the jury.
The appeal court judges concluded that the trial judge, Judianna Barnes, could have “steered the jury towards an impermissible line of reasoning” that rejected the possibility of his daughter using the carbon monoxide to kill insects.
Yoga ball stopper
During the trial in 2018, prosecutors had accused Khaw of placing the ball in the Mini belonging to Madam Wong, knowing she would be driving the car. The prosecutors contended he had unintentionally killed his daughter, who was unexpectedly not at school, as well.
When police investigators found the partially deflated ball in the car’s boot in November 2015, the stopper was missing.
They then found a yoga ball stopper in a drawer in Khaw’s study in 2016, leading the prosecution to suggest to a trial jury in 2018 that it may be from the ball placed in the car.
After a 21-day trial, the jury in September 2018 found him guilty of two counts of murder, with High Court Judge Barnes sentencing him to life in prison for each count of murder.
There was no evidence to connect the stopper found in the drawer with the yoga ball in the Mini Cooper, wrote the appeal court judges in their judgment on Nov 21, with other yoga balls also found at Khaw’s family residence.
The judge’s misdirection had allowed the jury to ignore the possibility that the stopper was displaced or mistakenly taken away by police officers, which would lead to the jury eliminating Lily as the person who placed the yoga ball in the car, added the appeal court judges.
In their appeal, Khaw’s lawyers offered the alternative possibility that his daughter Lily had placed the yoga ball in the car to kill insects she was terrified of. In recorded interviews, Khaw had also previously suggested Lily may have committed suicide with the lethal gas, claiming he had told only her about the contents of the ball.
Khaw, who was then employed in CUHK’s Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, had told investigators he had brought the carbon monoxide-filled balls home to kill rats after previous experiments on rabbits, a line of reasoning the prosecution had contended was “bogus”.
The court also heard he was in a relationship with a former student, who is now reportedly caring for his three other children.
Khaw had an earlier appeal thrown out by an appeal court in 2022, but Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in June 2023 approved his application to appeal over “grave injustice” involving the trial judge’s misdirection.
He was struck off the Hong Kong and British medical registers in 2020 for using his specialist knowledge to carry out the murders. - Agencies
