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Martin Wong

New testimony suggests gun used in armed holdup was same gun that killed constable

The coroner's officer in charge of an inquest into the death of four people, including a security guard of a Hang Seng Bank branch during an armed robbery in 2001, yesterday presented a video image  of a man  in Mizuno sneakers in an attempt to identify the suspected bank robber.

The evidence, presented by Arthur Luk Yee-shun,  came as fresh testimony suggested that the revolver used by the robber who shot Zafar Iqbal Khan in the bank's Belvedere Garden branch on December 5 was the same gun that killed constable Leung Shing-yan on March 14 of the same year.

Yesterday was the 11th day of the joint inquest into the deaths of Leung, Khan and the shoot-out deaths of two police constables, Tsang Kwok-hang and Tsui Po-ko, in Tsim Sha Tsui that shocked the city last year.  Police have stressed there is a link between the four deaths.

The photograph presented by Mr Luk, dated December 30, 2000, showed a man in a red pullover  bending down to hold a baby girl whose face had been blurred to conceal her identity.

Mr Luk did not identify the man.

The man's face was not clearly shown, but a sports shoe expert told the court yesterday that the pair of Mizuno shoes he wore was very similar to those of the robber's in the still pictures from the bank's closed-circuit recordings.

Pang Wai-hung, a manager of Ichikawa Sangyo - a distributor of Mizuno sports shoes  - confirmed that the robber was wearing a pair of Mizuno sports shoes.

Having looked at the pictures from the bank's closed-circuit videos, he said the shoes were a 'Next Alpha' model, of which 800 pairs had been imported and sold in Hong Kong between 2000 and 2001 at a price of HK$290.

Senior forensic evidence officer Cheung Kwok-keung said  he estimated the size of the Mizuno shoes at a Japanese size 27.5, according to a shoeprint found in the bank.

Mr Pang noted that only 130 pairs of that size had been sold in the city.

During the past 10 days of the hearing, Coroner Michael Chan Pik-kiu and a jury were told that constable Leung  was shot dead in Tsuen Wan on March 14, 2001,  and his service revolver and bullets were missing.

Yesterday, Choi Wai-yee, a ballistics examiner who is now retired, said from the grooves on the sides of the bullets found in the bank robbery, he could confirm that the firearm that killed the security guard was the same one that had killed Leung.

'Each [gun] barrel carries a unique mark of rifling grooves. So every bullet that goes through the barrel will be engraved on the sides of the bullets,' Mr Choi said.

He said the police force kept records of all rifling grooves it gathered  at crime scenes.

'From the rifling grooves, I can tell instantly that they matched with the firearms used in the March 2001 [Leung's] shooting case,' Mr Choi said. He said the bullets and the gun used in both cases were very similar to those used by the police but he could not say it was definitely a police gun.

In an application for a judicial review of the coroner's earlier decision to refuse to separate the hearings into the four deaths, the lawyer representing Tsui's mother told the Court of First Instance on Friday that evidence yet to emerge in the coroner's court would reveal Leung's missing gun was found underneath the body of Tsui in March last year and that Tsui's DNA matched samples that were obtained at the death scene of constable Leung.

As the application was ruled unsuccessful, the inquest continued concurrently.



Sneakers key to identity of bank robber