Carbon monoxide in car during Hong Kong yoga ball killing ‘35 times dangerous level’
Chemist tells High Court during Khaw Kim Sun’s murder trial that simulated concentrations were so high he had to get a different reader – and even that one could not read it all
The amount of carbon monoxide in a deadly yoga ball could have been at least 35 times the dangerous level, a forensic scientist told the murder trial of a Malaysian professor on Friday.
Government chemist Wong Koon-hung ran simulations of the leak, and told the High Court that at one point during his experiment the concentration of carbon monoxide in the car went beyond 7,000 parts per million (ppm). He said any reading of more than 200 ppm would be dangerous.
Khaw Kim Sun, 53, is accused of placing the ball, leaking the noxious gas, in the boot of the car which his wife Wong Siew Fing, 47, and daughter Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16, were in on May 22, 2015.
On Friday, Wong said he conducted a series of tests in 2015 and 2016 on the same grey yoga ball and yellow Mini Cooper Khaw was accused of using. He said he found no trace of the potentially deadly gas inside the ball, before the simulations.
Wong said the experiments, and the amount of the gas released, required a heavy-duty carbon monoxide detector, as a normal monitor can trace no more than 1,000 ppm of the gas.
