The yellow Mini Cooper at the heart of a case dubbed ‘the yoga ball murder’ became the center of attention today.
The judge, jury, defense lawyers and prosecutors involved in the murder trial were taken to the Police College in Wong Chuk Hang at around 10:30am this morning to inspect the vehicle where 47-year-old Wong Siew-fung and her 16-year-old daughter Lily were found three years ago.
According to on.cc, the group were inspecting the yellow Mini Cooper and another car of the same model for about half an hour before being taken back to the High Court.
The prosecution alleges that Wong’s husband Khaw Kim-sun, 53, plotted to kill his wife by filling a yoga ball with carbon monoxide and placing it in the back of his wife’s Mini Cooper after she refused to grant him a divorce.
The court heard that Wong’s marriage to Khaw, a Malaysian anesthetist and associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), broke down over the years, and that Khaw started having an affair with a student.
Khaw denies the two murder charges and maintains that he filled the yoga ball with carbon monoxide in order to kill rats.
However, Khaw’s colleagues at CUHK’s department of anaesthesia and intensive said they spotted him filling two yoga balls with carbon monoxide.
He claimed he wanted to test its purity and also told them he was experimenting with the effects of the gas on rabbits, the SCMP reports.
Yesterday, two specialists appeared at the court to discuss Khaw’s rabbit experiment — which involved drawing blood from a rabbit, mixing samples with carbon monoxide, reintroducing it into the animal, and then use oxygen of 60 percent concentration to see if it would improve the rabbit’s situation.
HK01 reports that haematologist Kwong Yok-lam from the University of Hong Kong’s department of medicine said the experiment was “not very useful” in clinical terms.
Kwong also described the methodology as “dubious”, and said that Khaw’s experiment could not be replicated on humans as humans, in most cases, inhaled carbon monoxide and did not have it introduced via the blood stream.
Meanwhile, Gavin Joynt, the chairman of Khaw’s department who overseas applications for research funding, said Khaw had e-mailed him for funding, but told the court he wouldn’t have funded the experiment as he had no idea how it would have benefitted humans, on.cc reports.
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