Murder case enthralls Hong Kong

HONG KONG — A yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide. An affair between a professor and his student. A dead wife and daughter.

Dr. Khaw Kim-sun, a 53-year-old Malaysian professor of anesthesiology in Hong Kong, is on trial on murder charges after the death of his wife and their 16-year-old daughter in May 2015, a case that has riveted the city.

A passing jogger noticed the mother and daughter in the family’s yellow Mini Cooper. The wife, Wong Siew-fing, 47, and daughter, Lily Li-ling Khaw, 16, were pronounced dead soon after at Prince of Wales Hospital, where Khaw worked. An autopsy found that the two had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

The defendant also worked in the department of anesthesia and intensive care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His colleagues reported having seen him pumping carbon monoxide into yoga exercise balls the day before the killings. One ball was found in the trunk of the Mini Cooper.

The toxic gas had been ordered for a rabbit experiment that Khaw had designed. But in court, the prosecutor questioning the scientific value of the experiment, suggesting it was a means to obtain the gas for murder.

Last week, a friend testified that Wong had known her husband was having an affair with a student, Shara Lee, who had previously tutored the couple’s children in the family home. Lee was an assistant in the rabbit experiment.

May-ling Khaw, 22, the couple’s eldest daughter, took the stand Monday and portrayed Khaw Kim-sun as a loving father despite his marital transgressions.

Khaw Kim-sun, who has pleaded not guilty, had told police that Lily might have tried to kill herself with the yoga ball. The prosecutor, Andrew Bruce, has called that a “lame excuse” and “simply untrue.”