Explainer | Hong Kong yoga ball murder: what has changed since the verdict in 2018?
The Post unpacks how the defence and prosecution shifted strategies, and what prompted the retrial
Former university professor and anaesthesiologist Khaw Kim Sun received a life sentence on Tuesday after a Hong Kong jury found him guilty of murdering his wife and daughter with an inflatable yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide.
The pair were found dead on May 22, 2015, in their Mini Cooper car parked on the side of the road in Sai Kung, mere minutes away from their home.
The Post explores how the defence and the prosecution changed strategies, including the latter’s omission of the discovery of a yoga ball stopper in Khaw’s drawer, the piece of evidence that led to the Court of Final Appeal quashing the conviction and ordering a retrial in 2023.
1. Prosecution case
The prosecutors – Senior Counsel Andrew Bruce in 2018 and Jonathan Man Tak-ho in the retrial – put an emphasis on Khaw’s excuse for storing carbon monoxide.
Khaw said he needed the gas for a research project on using oxygen to resuscitate rabbits poisoned with carbon monoxide. But prosecutors said the research had little to no clinical value and was an excuse for Khaw to obtain the lethal gas for other purposes.
In both trials, none of the prosecution witnesses said they had seen Khaw putting the yoga ball in the boot of his wife’s Mini Cooper and pulled the stopper to release the gas. But Bruce had asked the jury to look at circumstantial evidence.
Prosecutors in the two trials argued Khaw was the only person in the family who had a motive to kill his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, while mistakenly taking the life of his 16-year-old daughter Lily Khaw Li Ling.
