Mr Hitler Nwala, a witness for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, told the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) that all 110 BVAS machines he inspected had their results erased.
Nwala, a subpoenaed witness, made the claim on Thursday in Abuja while testifying as an expert witness for the petitioners in their petition challenging the outcome of the presidential election on February 25.
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Mr Chris Uche, SAN, the petitioner’s lead counsel, testified that the machines inspected were only those from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
He also told the court that he was a Digital Forensic Analyst and that he didn’t know when the results on machines were deleted.
Under cross-examination by INEC counsel, Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, the witness stated 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 commission’s permission to connect an external device to the BVAS machine, the witness said yes.
Mahmoud then asked the witness if he was aware that inspecting only 110 of the 3,163 BVAS deployed in the FCT amounted to only 3.4% of the total number of BVAS deployed in the FCT and 0.6% of BVAS deployed nationwide.
The witness responded in court by saying that he only compiled the report and did not take the time to calculate the percentages.
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The INEC counsel attempted to give the witness a BVAS machine to see if it had been deleted as he stated in his report.
However, the witness stated that collecting the BVAS machine in open court to check it would be against the ethics of his profession.
“It is unethical to gain access to a device that will be used as evidence in a competent court because it will tamper with the evidence.”
“We cannot directly access the device; instead, we extract the evidence and transport it for analysis.”
Furthermore, the witness testified in court that because all of the devices were the same model and appeared the same on the outside, he couldn’t tell if it was one of the ones he inspected simply by looking at it.
Mr Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, counsel to the All Progressives Congress (APC), told the witness that neither he nor any of his team members signed the six-volume forensic report.
The witness, on the other hand, insisted on signing both the report and the certificate of compliance.
Mr Wole Olanipekun, SAN, counsel to President Bola Tinubu, confronted the witness with a portion of his report in which he stated that “nothing was intrinsically wrong with them” based on his inspection of the machines.
“Did you happen to be in Abuja on the day of the presidential election?”
“How can you know that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the machines on election day if you were not in Abuja?”
The witness stated that because he was not in Abuja on election day, he could not have known if anything went wrong with the machines.
After the witness was released, the petitioners went on to tender Forms EC8A series from 20 Ogun local government areas, 17 Ondo local government areas, 27 Jigawa local government areas, and 20 Rivers local government areas.
The petition was adjourned until Friday by the court’s Chairman, Justice Haruna Tsammani.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Atiku and the PDP are expected to close their case on Friday based on the pre-hearing report.
According to NAN, they requested three weeks to present their case, which expired on Tuesday, but the court extended their time by three days because they had missed three days, one of which was the June 12 Democracy Day Public Holiday.
(NAN)
