Tampering with video footage recorded by surveillance cameras located inside the apartment building where Andrew Loku was fatally shot by Toronto police would be exceedingly onerous and difficult to pull off undetected, a coroner’s inquest heard Tuesday.

“(It would have been) very hard to do, very hard to not get noticed,” said Jack Zhang, the technical support supervisor for CCTV Direct, the company operating the surveillance cameras inside the Toronto residence where Loku was killed.

“It doesn’t look like it was accessed by anyone using any back door,” Zhang told jurors.

Video footage — and gaps therein — has been a significant issue in Loku’s death, currently being probed by a coroner’s inquest into its second day.

Loku, 45, was shot dead by a Toronto police officer in the early hours of July 5, 2015 while he was holding a hammer. The SIU, Ontario’s civilian police watchdog, did not criminally charge the officer who shot Loku, concluding the use of force was justified to stop what the officer believed was an imminent hammer attack.

The officer who shot Loku, who has not yet been identified, is expected to testify during the three-week inquest.

Parts of the interaction between Loku and Toronto police were captured on video, including Loku walking toward officers holding a hammer prior to the shooting. That video has not yet been released but is expected to be shown during the inquest.

However, the cameras did not capture the key moment immediately before Loku was shot, meaning there is no exact depiction of important factors such as Loku’s behaviour at the time or how close he was to officers when he was killed.

Coroner’s court heard the cameras do not record at all times, due to hard drive space constraints. Instead, they are on a motion trigger that is sensitive to changes in light, which could explain why some parts of Loku’s interaction with police — at a distance from the camera, in low lighting — weren’t captured.

Concerns about the gaps in the video were underscored by Tony Loparco, director of the SIU, in his March 2016 report on Loku’s death. In it, Loparco criticized the actions of one Toronto police officer following the shooting, who Loparco said wrongly inserted himself into the investigation by “improperly” attempting to review and download surveillance video of the shooting.

The accusations were quickly countered by Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders, who said the officer was fulfilling his job to secure the scene, and was in fact acting upon the direction of the service’s SIU liaison officer.

In his report, Loparco stated the officer’s conduct raised suspicion about police involvement with the video that would not have been there if police had just been hands off. The watchdog therefore sought the expertise of both the manufacturer’s technician and a forensic investigator from the Ministry of Finance, who “jointly concluded that no video was missing or deleted and that there was no evidence of tampering with the system,” according to the report.

Under questioning Tuesday, Andrew VanOosten, the Ministry of Finance senior investigator, revealed that at the time Loparco released his report, he had not conducted his own probe, but instead relied on the information from Zhang, the CCTV Direct employee.

“It’s your evidence, that you yourself, as the senior forensic investigator connected to this file, between July of 2015 and March 15, 2016 (when the SIU released its report) . . . did no independent forensic investigation,” asked Jonathan Shime, the Loku family lawyer.

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VanOosten agreed, but said that after he was called to testify at the coroner’s inquest, he conducted his own forensic investigation using technology he hadn’t previously been able to access, and concluded there was no evidence of tampering or deletion.

The inquest continues Wednesday.