Tribunal: Atiku’s witness accuses INEC of deleting results on all BVAS machines inspected
Mr Hitler Nwala, a Digital Forensic Analyst and witness of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar has told the Presidential Election Petitions Court that results on all the 110 Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines he inspected were deleted.
Mr Nwala, a subpoenaed witness, said this while giving evidence as an expert witness for the petitioners in their petition challenging the outcome of the Feb. 25 presidential election.
Led in evidence by the lead counsel for the PDP, Mr Chris Uche (SAN), the witness said that the machines inspected were only those from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
He also told the court that he didn’t know at what point the results were deleted on the machines.
Under cross-examination by Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, counsel for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the witness said that he attached a standard device used for such an exercise to the machine to arrive at the conclusion.
When asked if he had the authority of the commission to attach an external device to the BVAS machine, the witness answered in the affirmative.
Mahmoud further asked the witness if he was aware that inspecting only 110 machines out of 3,163 that were deployed in the FCT amounted to only 3.4 per cent of the total number of BVAS deployed in the FCT and 0.06 per cent of BVAS deployed nationwide.
To this end, the witness told the court that he only compiled the report and didn’t take out time to calculate the percentages.
The INEC counsel attempted to give a BVAS machine to the witness to check if it was deleted as he had said in his report but Nwala said it is against the ethics of his profession to collect the BVAS machine in the open within the court for examination.
The witness also told the court that since all the devices had the same model and looked the same on the outside, he couldn’t tell if it was one of the ones he inspected by merely looking at it.
Counsel for the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Lateef Fagbemi, told the witness that neither he nor any of his team members signed the six-volume forensic report.
The witness, however, insisted that he signed the report as well as the certificate of compliance.
On his part, counsel for President Bola Tinubu, Mr Wole Olanipekun (SAN) confronted the witness with a portion of his report where he said that from his inspection of the machines, nothing was intrinsically wrong with them.
The witness said that he was not in Abuja and so he couldn’t have known if something went wrong with the machines on the day of the election.
After the witness was discharged, the petitioners went further to tender Forms EC8A series from 20 local government areas of Ogun, 17 local government areas of Ondo, 27 local government areas of Jigawa, and 20 local government areas of Rivers.
Justice Haruna Tsammani subsequently adjourned the hearing of the petition till Friday (Today).