On Thursday, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, presented a digital forensic expert as a witness in support of their petition against President Bola Tinubu, challenging his declaration as president by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) at the Presidential Elections Petition Court.
During the ongoing hearing of their petition, the 26th witness, presented by the petitioners’ counsel, Chris Uche, SAN, provided a report based on his investigation of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Despite objections from the respondents, the report was admitted as evidence and marked as exhibits.
The petitioners also submitted a certificate of compliance to demonstrate that the report adhered to the provisions of the Evidence Act.
The expert witness, Hitler Nwala, stated that his findings indicated deliberate deletion of the election results from the BVAS machine for the Federal Capital Territory during the presidential elections.
The witness told the court that “he worked on 110 BVAS machines which formed the primary source of information for his forensic report.”
He stated that only the machines from the FCT were inspected according to him.
However, he admitted that he was uncertain about when the results were deleted on those machines.
During questioning by INEC’s counsel, Abubakar Mahmoud, the witness mentioned that he connected a standard device to the BVAS machine to conduct his investigation.
However, INEC disputed his accusation, asserting that his claim was incorrect because he didn’t examine all the machines. Despite the challenge, the witness continued to uphold his position.
The senior counsel then inquired whether the witness was aware that examining only 110 machines out of the total 3,163 deployed in the FCT represented merely 3.4 percent of the overall number of BVAS machines used in the FCT and a mere 0.06 percent of BVAS machines deployed across the country.
To illustrate his point, Mahmoud presented a BVAS machine to the court and requested the witness to access it and provide evidence of data deletion.
The witness responded that it would be professionally inappropriate for him to directly access the machine.
He said, “We don’t access the source of evidence directly. We extract the evidence and access it from another source.”
“If we access it now, the content will change and will tamper with the evidence. It is professionally wrong to tamper with evidence that will be relied upon in a court of law.”
INEC insisted the BVAS must be inspected in court. But the chairman of the five-man panel, Justice Haruna Tsammani informed the counsel that the allotted time for conducting his cross-examination had elapsed.
Meanwhile, counsel for Tinubu, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, pointed out disparities in the forensic report concerning the number of machines inspected by the witness.
The senior advocate hinted that the report could equally be riddled with errors.
But the witness told the court that the differences dictated in the numbers were typographical errors.
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.
Thereafter, Justice Haruna Tsammani adjourned the hearing of the petition until Friday.
