The witness who was led in evidence by the petitioners' lead counsel, Chris Uche (SAN), identified himself as a digital forensic analyst but told the court that he did not know at what point the results were deleted from the machines.
Hitler Nwanna, a subpoenaed witness presented at the Presidential Election Petition Court by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, on Thursday accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of deleting election results from all the 110 Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) he inspected.
Nwanna made the allegation in Abuja while giving evidence as an expert witness for the petitioners in their petition challenging the outcome of the February 25 presidential election.
The witness who was led in evidence by the petitioners' lead counsel, Chris Uche (SAN), identified himself as a digital forensic analyst but told the court that he did not know at what point the results were deleted from the machines.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that during cross-examination by the counsel for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), the witness said he attached a standard device used for such an exercise to the machine to arrive at the conclusion.
And when asked if he had the authority of the commission to attach an external device to the BVAS machine, Nwanna answered ‘yes’.
But when the INEC lawyer 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, he told the court that he only compiled the report and didn’t take out time to calculate the percentages.
When the INEC lawyer attempted to give a BVAS machine to the witness to check if it was deleted as he had said in his report, the witness refused, saying that it would be against the ethics of his profession to collect the BVAS machine in open court to check it.
He said, “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.”
The witness further 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.
Also, counsel for the All Progressives Congress (APC), Lateef Fagbemi (SAN) told the witness that neither he nor any of his team members signed the six-volume forensic report but the witness insisted that he signed the report as well as the certificate of compliance.
Wole Olonipekun (SAN), Counsel for President Bola Tinubu, also 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”.
Olanipekun asked the witness, “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 the election?”
Responding, the witness said 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.
The Chairman of the court, Justice Haruna Tsammani, thereafter adjourned the hearing of the petition to Friday.