Expert can't confirm rusty gun's link to killings

Tests were 'inconclusive' as to whether the gun retrieved from the Tsim Sha Tsui shoot-out scene last year was used in two killings in 2001, the Coroner's Court was told yesterday.

A forensics expert confirmed that the gun found under the body of off-duty constable Tsui Po-ko was the revolver of constable Leung Shing-yan, missing since Leung was gunned down in Tsuen Wan in March 2001.

But Jeffery Lloyd Chow, of the police force's forensic firearms examination bureau, said the gun had become very rusty and the grooves it made on bullets when they were fired could have changed.

'The gun was very much rusted on the outside and in the barrel,' Mr Chow told the inquest into the deaths of Tsui, shoot-out victim Tsang Kwok-hang, Leung and security guard Zafar Iqbal Khan, who was shot in a bank robbery in Tsuen Wan in December 2001.

'The rusted barrel might add extra patterns to the grooves, which made the grooves shown on bullets fired by this gun in 2006 similar, but not identical to the ones we discovered in the two incidents in 2001,' he said.

The police have been relying on the gun to link last year's shoot-out to the two 2001 killings.

Mr Chow said his examination had shown that the gun was used to kill constable Tsang in a Canton Road underpass on March 17 last year.