A prosecution witness 26 (PW26) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, Mr Hitler Nwala has told the Presidential Election Petition Court, (PEPC) that results on all the 110 BVAS machines he inspected were deleted.
Testifying before the court, Nwala said that the machines inspected were only those from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Led in evidence-in-chief by the lead counsel to Atiku, Chief Chris Uche SAN, the subpoenaed witness said that he was a Digital Forensic Analyst and that he didn’t know at what point the results were deleted it from the machines.
Under cross examination by counsel to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, 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.
In his defense, the expert witness said 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.
The witness, however, said that it would be against the ethics of his profession to collect the BVAS machine in open court to check it.
“It is professionally wrong to access a device that will be used as evidence in a court of competent jurisdiction because it will temper with the evidence.
“We cannot access the device directly, what we do is to extract the evidence and take it for analysis.”
Moreover, the witness told the court that since all the devices had the same model and look the same on the outside, he couldn’t tell if it was one of the ones he inspected my merely looking at it.
On his part, counsel to the All Progressives Congress, (APC) Mr Lateef Fagbemi, SAN told the witness that neither he nor any of his team member 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 to President Bola Tinubu, Mr Wole Olanipekin, 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”.
“Were you in Abuja on the day of the presidential election?
“If you were not in Abuja, how then can you know that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the machines on the day of election?”
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 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.
The Chairman of the Court, Justice Haruna Tsammani adjourned hearing in the petition until Friday.
Recall that going by the pre-hearing report, Atiku and the PDP are expected to close their case on
Thursday, 22nd June (today), however a grace of one day was given. With the new development, the Prosecution will be closing their case on Friday, the 23rd, June.
