Additionally, he admitted to the court that he had no idea when the results had been erased from the devices.
The presidential election petition court has been informed by Mr. Hitler Nwala, a digital forensic analyst and witness for the People’s Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, that all 110 of the BVAS machines he examined had their results erased.
In his testimony as an expert witness for the petitioners in their petition contesting the results of the Feb. 25 presidential election, Mr. Nwala, a subpoenaed witness, made this statement.
The witness, who was introduced as evidence by Mr. Chris Uche, SAN, the main attorney for the PDP, claimed that the machines examined were all from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Additionally, he admitted to the court that he had no idea when the results had been erased from the devices.
The witness stated during cross-examination by Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud, counsel for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), that he fitted a conventional gadget used for such an activity to the machine to reach the conclusion.
The witness responded in the positive when asked if he received permission from the commission to connect an extra device to the BVAS machine.
Mahmoud subsequently questioned the witness, asking if he was aware that only 110 of the 3,163 deployed BVAS in the FCT had been inspected, which amounted to just 3.4% of the FCT’s total BVAS deployment and 0.6% of all BVAS deployed nationwide.
To this aim, the witness said before the court that he did not set aside time to calculate the percentages, just compiling the report.
The INEC counsel made an attempt to provide the witness a BVAS machine so that he could see if it had been erased as stated in his report, but Nwala objected, claiming that it was against the ethics of his profession to take the BVAS machine into the open within the court for examination.
The witness further testified in court that he was unable to identify any particular device by simply glancing at it because every one of them had the same model and outside appearance.
The witness was informed by Mr. Lateef Fagbemi, counsel for the All Progressives Congress, that neither he nor any of his team members had signed the six-volume forensic report.
However, the witness requested that he sign both the certificate of conformity and the report.
For his part, President Bola Tinubu’s attorney, Mr. Wole Olanipekun, SAN, presented the witness with a section of his report in which he claimed that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the machines based on his evaluation of them.
The witness claimed that because he wasn’t in Abuja on election day, he couldn’t have known if there were any issues with the equipment.
The petitioners then submitted 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 after the witness was released from duty.
After upon, Justice Haruna Tsammani postponed the petition hearing till Friday.
