It sounds like a plot of a movie.
A university professor having an affair with a student plans to murder his wife with a gas-filled yoga ball placed in her car.
The plan goes wrong, however, when his teenage daughter also gets in the car and both die.
This, according to reports, was the outline of the high-profile murder case against Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) professor Khaw Kim-sun, which began yesterday at the High Court and will continue for around three weeks.
Kwan, a Malaysian-born professor at CUHK’s department of anaesthesia and intensive care, denies murdering his wife, 47, and daughter, 16, who were found unconscious in a Mini Cooper parked in Ma On Shan’s Sai O Village by a jogger on May 22, 2015.
The two died of carbon monoxide poisoning shortly after and, following a more than two-year investigation, Kwan was arrested and charged in September last year.
Yesterday, prosecutors laid out their case.
The court heard Kwan filled a yoga ball with carbon monoxide at a laboratory at the Chinese University, according to Apple Daily.
He was alleged to have used a “cover story” to obtain the gas — “researching” carbon monoxide with a student, the same student with whom he was allegedly conducting an extramarital affair.
On the day of the alleged murder, the court heard Khaw did not know his daughter, one of the couple’s four children, would join his wife in the car where he had left the yoga ball, a hole in which had been unblocked, allowing the gas to escape.
The court heard, when questioned by police, Khaw had filled the ball with carbon monoxide in order to “kill mice”.
The prosecution, according to RTHK, called this a “lame excuse” as the defendant knew that the amount of gas would be lethal to person.
It was noted that when the defendant took the yoga ball home, he placed devices in the car to monitor the level of gas in the car.
According to HK01, the prosecution said that Khaw’s relationship with his wife had been deteriorating since 2011.
Prosecutors also presented entry and exit records from the Immigration Department, which revealed that Khaw and a woman — the student with whom he was having an affair with — had entered and left Hong Kong nine times between 2013 and 2015.
The last time the pair left Hong Kong was late August 2015, three months after the deaths of his wife and daughter.
The trial, which will see some 20 prosecution witnesses called, continues.
