VANCOUVER - Robert Dziekanski was lying dead on the floor of Vancouver's airport, his entire face blue, 90 seconds after RCMP officers who shocked him with a Taser say he was alive and breathing, a paramedic told a public inquiry Thursday.

Allan Maciak and his partner arrived more than 10 minutes after four RCMP officers confronted Dziekanski in the early morning of Oct. 14, 2007, and stunned him multiple times with a Taser.

"What was your impression about his state of being?" asked Art Vertlieb, a lawyer for the inquiry.

"Mr. Dziekanski was dead," replied Maciak.

Maciak and his partner, with the help of firefighters and two additional paramedics who arrived later, performed CPR on Dziekanski for nearly half an hour before officially declaring him dead.

Maciak's testimony raised more questions about how the officers cared for Dziekanski after he fell to the ground and lost consciousness.

Four Mounties confronted Dziekanski in the airport's international arrivals area, where an agitated Dziekanski had been throwing furniture. They stunned him multiple times after he picked up a stapler.

The supervising RCMP officer, Cpl. Benjamin Monty Robinson, has insisted he monitored Dziekanski's condition after he was shocked and handcuffed.

Robinson told the inquiry that when he turned Dziekanski over to firefighters, about a minute and a half before paramedics arrived, he was breathing and had a pulse.

But firefighters earlier told the inquiry Dziekanski wasn't breathing and they could detect no heartbeat when they reached the scene before the paramedics.

Maciak said when he arrived to take over from firefighters, Dziekanski had a condition known as cyanosis, a serious circulation problem that turns the skin blue and progresses from the extremities into the face and body.

"His lips were blue, his tongue was at the front of his mouth, it was blue, incontinent with urine, unresponsive," said Maciak.

Maciak and other paramedics told the inquiry it would be difficult to tell how long it would take for cyanosis to set in or for a patient to go into cardiac arrest, with estimates ranging between two and 10 minutes.

Robinson testified earlier this week he noticed Dziekanski's ear was blue and assumed it was bruising from his fall to the floor.

Maciak acknowledged bruising could cause discolouration, but he said it is often the first sign of cyanosis.

He wouldn't speculate about how long Dziekanski had been dead but later suggested to police that he must have had cyanosis for a length of time.

"As soon as you rolled him over you could tell, it was pretty obvious he was lifeless," Maciak said in a statement in January 2008. "He had been down for a little while, and this isn't something that just happened."

Robinson also told the inquiry Dziekanski was snoring, which Maciak said could have been a sign of airway problems.

The corporal testified that after noticing the snoring, he moved Dziekanski onto his side. However, firefighters and Maciak have said Dziekanski was lying flat on his stomach when they arrived.

The paramedics were critical of what firefighters were doing when they arrived.

Maciak's partner, Mike Egli, said when he arrived, the firefighters didn't appear to be doing anything to help Dziekanski aside from checking his pulse.

He said the firefighters should have noticed the cyanosis and started giving oxygen immediately.

"I yelled at the fireman to, 'Get the damn oxygen on him now,"' said Egli.

Egli said he complained to his supervisors the next day about the firefighters' conduct.

"I was mad, I was very upset," he said.

"There was no life-saving interventions that were being done at the time."

The paramedics had asked twice for Dziekanski's handcuffs to be removed, and the firefighters said they asked once, as well. One of the officers reluctantly complied, but only after warning that the man could become violent if he regained consciousness.

Meanwhile, Maciak said he was given incorrect information about how many times Dziekanski was stunned with the Taser.

The Taser's internal computer indicates it was deployed five times, but Maciak said he was told by the officer who fired the Taser it was only cycled three times.

That officer, Const. Kwesi Millington, has testified that he couldn't remember giving any information to paramedics.