VANCOUVER - The lawyer who exposed an alleged coverup after a man froze to death in a Vancouver alley says the forensic evidence doesn't match the story told by two police officers.

Dana Urban, a former senior lawyer at the Office of the Police Complaint Commission, told a public inquiry Wednesday that the position of Frank Paul's body and clothing and a video recording showing the man couldn't move suggest he was already dead of hypothermia before police left him in the alley.

Const. David Instant has testified he left Paul in an alley after a sergeant at the city drunk tank refused to admit the homeless, chronic alcoholic, insisting he wasn't intoxicated.

Instant has told the inquiry that after dragging Paul into a police wagon, he helped the man walk out of the vehicle before propping him against a wall and ensuring he was OK.

But Urban, now stationed in Sri Lanka as an international war crimes prosecutor, told the inquiry that forensic evidence suggests Instant "creates a scene'' of helping Paul in a report he wrote about the incident.

"In my many years of doing murder trials and what not and trying to pay attention to detail it was clear to me, based on all of the evidence, that it simply could not, in my view, have been true,'' he said of Instant's account.

Urban said a video recording of Paul at the drunk tank on Dec. 5, 1998, just before he was taken to the alley, clearly shows Instant dragging the man who isn't moving.

In forensic photos shown earlier at the inquiry, Paul, a 48-year-old Mi'kmaq from New Brunswick, is seen lying in an alley on a patch of gravel several metres from a wall.

Urban said there aren't any supports that Paul could have used to move himself from the wall or crawl away because there were no marks on his stomach.

Photos of Paul's upper clothing also indicate he could not have crawled because his top would have been down below his stomach instead of pulled up, which is more consistent with having been dragged, Urban said.

He suggested the evidence indicates it's possible that Paul was dead before he was taken to the alley. That's in keeping with a pathologist's conclusion that Paul may have died in police custody, he said.

But Urban said he has no notes of a November 2000 meeting with pathologist Rex Ferris, who was presented with the evidence after the Crown refused to lay charges against Instant and former Sgt. Russell Sanderson.

Urban said other notes he had on the case also disappeared from the Office of the Police Complaint Commission.

Ferris has already told the inquiry he doesn't remember suggesting Paul was already dead when Instant, a junior officer, dumped him in the alley.

Urban said it was clear that despite repeated requests to hold an inquiry into Paul's death, former police complaint commissioner Don Morrison wasn't interested and that he even walked out of a meeting with Ferris.

He said Morrison often gave him the brush off by grunting or waving him off when the subject of an inquiry came up.

"I just truly couldn't understand, why in a case like this (when) a helpless man needlessly died, that he didn't want to focus on it and I just became more exasperated the stronger the case became, that there was something seriously wrong in the police version of events,'' Urban said.

He said Morrison once told him: "What do you want me to do _ wreck a young officer's career?''

Urban also said Morrison refused to watch the video of Paul's final moments.

"It made me angry that he hadn't taken the time to watch it and I point out, asked him, `Why don't you watch the bloody video?' Again, I got this hand or snort or grunt or whatever and he walked off, seemingly disinterested in it.''

Urban told the inquiry that he had been friends with his boss before the Paul inquiry issue came up and that Morrison had invited him to work at the police complaint commission in September 2000.

Urban said he stayed in his position until May 2001 and left to work as a Crown prosecutor for the B.C. government until April 2003, when he returned to the commission after Morrison left amid controversy.

Paul's cousin, Peggy Clement of the New Brunswick community of Elsipogtog, said outside the inquiry Wednesday that she's grateful for the work Urban has done in getting the facts of Paul's case publicly aired almost a decade after his death.

Clement said police told her family that Paul had died in a hit-and-run incident but that it wasn't until two years later that they learned the truth after a call from Urban.