A digital forensic expert, Mr. Hitler Nwala, on Thursday, narrated before the Presidential Election Petition Court, sitting in Abuja, how he discovered that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, wiped off results of the presidential election that held on February 25.
Mr. Nwala, who is the 25th witness of the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar.
Testifying before the Justice Haruna Tsammani-led five-member panel, the witness alleged that the results that were deleted, were contained in the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines, that were deployed for the conduct of the elections.
He told the court that he specifically inspected and conducted forensic analysis on 110 BVAS that were deployed for the conduct of the presidential election in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja.
According to him, upon his enquiry, the electoral body maintained that it had to wipe off the information in the BVAS to be able to redeploy them for the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections that held on March 18.
However, during cross-examination of the witness, counsel to INEC, Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, faulted report of the witness, stressing that 110 BVAS devices used for the election were not sufficient to establish that there was any irregularity on the part of the Commission.
Mahmoud, while contending that the sample size the witness relied on to write his report, was small, noted that a total of 3, 263 BVAS devices, were deployed during the presidential election.
He argued that the sample the witness based his report on, represented only about 3.5 percent of the total device the INEC deployed in FCT and and 0.06 percent of the total BVAS that was used for the presidential election, across the country.
On their part, both President Bola Tinubu, whose legal team was led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, and APC’s legal team led by Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, urged the court to reject the report of the witness which they said was laced with manifest errors.
Nonetheless, the petitioners’ counsel, Chris Uche, SAN, described the evidence of the witness as very vital to the case of his clients “considering that it was the first that we had a technologically driven election in this country”.
