A former university professor in Hong Kong accused of murdering his family with a yoga ball filled with lethal gas has been found guilty of killing his wife and daughter, after failing to clear his name in a retrial.
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After less than four hours of deliberation, a High Court jury on Tuesday unanimously found Malaysian anaesthesiologist Khaw Kim Sun guilty of causing the deaths of his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their second child, Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16.
The two died of carbon monoxide poisoning after a leaking inflatable yoga ball filled with a lethal amount of the gas was placed in the boot of Khaw’s Mini Cooper car.
Khaw, 60, was convicted of two counts of murder in the 2018 trial, but fought to clear his name by appealing to the Court of Final Appeal in 2023 while serving a life sentence.
The city’s top court at that time quashed his conviction after ruling that the trial judge had misdirected the jury. The case was sent back to the High Court for retrial, which began in November last year.
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Unlike during the earlier trial, Khaw decided to represent himself after firing his legal representatives shortly after the start of the retrial.
He also took the witness box to tell the seven-member jury that he had bought carbon monoxide for an experiment in his lab, in which oxygen was used to resuscitate rabbits poisoned with the lethal gas.