Malaysian professor jailed for life in Hong Kong for yoga ball murders

A former university professor in Hong Kong was jailed for life on Tuesday after being found guilty of murdering his wife and teenage daughter with a yoga ball filled with lethal gas in 2015, having failed to clear his name in a retrial. After less than four hours of deliberation, a seven-member High Court jury 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 leaky inflatable yoga ball filled with a lethal amount of the gas was placed in the boot of Khaw’s Mini Cooper car on May 22, 2015. Khaw, 60, was convicted of two counts of murder after a trial in 2018, but fought to clear his name while serving a life sentence by lodging an appeal. In 2023, the Court of Final Appeal quashed his conviction after ruling that the trial judge had misdirected the jury. The case was sent back to the High Court for the retrial, which began in November last year. High Court Deputy Judge Brian Keith on Tuesday handed down a life sentence, the mandatory punishment for murder. The judge asked the accused if he had anything to say before sentencing, Khaw replied: “No, my lord.” Khaw did not display any emotion when he heard the verdict. The judge told members of the jury they had a “profound” responsibility and had made a decision on another person’s life. Given the length of the trial – 41 days – and the complexity of the evidence considered, the judge exempted the seven members from future jury duty for life. Khaw decided to represent himself during the retrial, firing his legal representatives shortly after it started. He also took the witness box to tell the 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. Prosecutor Jonathan Man Tak-ho challenged the clinical value of the experiment and accused Khaw of fabricating an “innocent explanation” to hide his real motive for possessing the lethal gas. But Khaw told the court his experiment was part of a “bigger project” to look for treatment for patients suffering from lethal gas poisoning, a developing idea which he had only mentioned to his research assistant Shara Lee Wee-yee, a PhD student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with whom he was having an affair. Man argued that Khaw had a motive to kill his wife of 23 years, as he had a better relationship with Lee than with his spouse, with whom he had constant arguments and no longer cared for. Wong’s close friends testified for the prosecution that Khaw had refused to divorce his wife because he did not want her to get half of his net worth, which was tens of millions of dollars. But Khaw claimed his wife had accepted his relationship with Lee, and even made an agreement with her that the affair could continue as long as it was kept quiet. In his defence, Khaw said that if he had indeed planned the murder, he would not have been so “stupid” as to leave a record that could be traced back to him as the buyer of the carbon monoxide. He called a former research colleague, a fellow anaesthesiologist from Australia, and three other character witnesses to testify for him, talking about how he had developed research ideas over the years and a “guardian angel” who had saved many lives. But Khaw admitted bringing two yoga balls filled with carbon monoxide back to his house, saying he wanted to use the gas to exterminate shrews as they had been a long-standing pest problem in his home. The “yoga ball murder case” first captured the attention of the public and the media in 2018, after police spent nearly two years investigating Khaw as a suspect. Khaw married Wong, with whom he had three daughters and a son, in 1992. His three other children attended the first trial almost every day, with the eldest daughter testifying that Khaw was deeply saddened to learn of the death of his family members. Although his immediate family had seemed to be absent in the retrial, Khaw told the court that he believed the three children – all of whom are now adults – had done well after the death of their loved ones. His eldest daughter is a doctor in Australia, while one of the younger children is a vet. The other one is a dentist in training in Malaysia. Khaw moved to Hong Kong in 1996 when he took up a job at the university’s department of anaesthesia and intensive care. He initially only planned to stay in Hong Kong for a year, but eventually made the city his permanent home.

Malaysian professor jailed for life in Hong Kong for yoga ball murders

High Court jury unanimously finds Malaysian anaesthesiologist Khaw Kim Sun guilty of causing the deaths of his wife and their second child