The daughters of a taxi driver who died after being put in a headlock during an arrest in 2012 have called on Hong Kong authorities to bring the police officer involved to justice after an inquest concluded that he was killed unlawfully.
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A jury of two men and three women on Thursday returned the same rare verdict a separate panel had reached when the decade-old case regarding Chan Fai-wong’s death was first examined at the Coroner’s Court in 2018.
Chan died from complications arising from a cervical vertebra dislocation in December 2012, a month after Constable Lam Wai-wing pulled him into a police vehicle while wrapping his arm around the man’s neck.
The officer maintained that he had immediately released his arm the moment it came into contact with the driver’s neck.
The High Court in 2022 quashed a five-member jury’s 3-2 verdict of unlawful killing in the first inquest after finding the presiding coroner had oversimplified her instructions to the jurors to the effect of usurping their role in determining the facts of the case.
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The new jury on Thursday reached the same conclusion, but by a wider margin of 4-1, after closed-door deliberations began the previous day.