Source:
https://scmp.com/article/736380/review-nepalis-shooting-denied

Review of Nepali's shooting denied

The widow of a homeless Nepali man shot dead by a police officer in Ho Man Tin in 2009 has failed yet again to have a decision that her husband was lawfully killed reviewed.

Sony Rai expressed disappointment yesterday after the Court of First Instance rejected her application for a judicial review of an earlier ruling by the coroner's court.

Rai said: 'I can't understand why it was considered that the police officer had no alternative but to fatally shoot my husband, a small man who had nothing but part of a chair leg in his hand on that day.'

Police constable Hui Ka-ki shot Limbu on a hillside on March 17, 2009. He maintained that he fired in self-defence.

Rai's lawyers sought to challenge the verdict, which was returned by a jury before Coroner William Ng Sing-wai, on May 25 last year. They alleged bias, misdirection and that the scope of the inquest was too narrow.

The judgment came just over a week after the application was heard. Mr Justice Anselmo Reyes yesterday dismissed all grounds of the challenge.

Rai lawyer Michael Vidler said: 'If this inquest had been into the shooting of a local property tycoon or a senior civil servant on the same hillside by a police officer, it would have been handled very differently.'

The widow accused the police of emphasising since the start of their investigation that her late husband was an 'unemployed, homeless, dark-skinned foreigner with criminal convictions'. Limbu was a permanent resident in Hong Kong.

Rai has yet to decide whether to appeal.

Counsel for Rai, Philip Dykes SC, argued that the coroner should have given the jury the option to return a verdict of unlawful killing by murder.

But Mr Justice Reyes said that such an option did not follow from the facts.

A report by independent pathologist Dr Beh Swan Lip, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, on the trajectory of the bullet that killed Limbu suggested that the deceased was not facing Hui, threatening him with a frontal assault.

Dykes argued that Ng was biased in calling Beh to give oral evidence while allowing the jury to have a copy of the government's report that contradicted Beh's.

Mr Justice Reyes dismissed the claim that the jury could have been biased against Beh's evidence.

He also disagreed with Dykes' argument that Ng had been wrong to allow the Commissioner of Police not to disclose police training details in the name of public interest.

Law Yuk-kai, the director of Human Rights Monitor, was disappointed with the ruling, saying it showed 'the court and coroner are happy to be kept in the dark by police'. The coroner only endorsed material provided by police instead of scrutinising their procedures, such as police training material, Law said.

The public's trust in inquests had been lost as the Limbu inquest had not examined any possible wrongdoing by the force, and 'the public learnt nothing from it', he said.

The judge said that during the inquest, Ng had said ample forensic evidence had been presented and Rai's lawyer had questioned Hui's training in great detail over eight days of cross-examination.

'It was the coroner's duty to keep control of the inquest and ensure that matters did not get out of hand. This is precisely what he was doing,' the judge said.