A witness brought by the Peoples Democratic Party and Atiku Abubakar has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of deliberately deleting results on Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines.

Testifying against INEC, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the witness, Hitler Nwala, a digital forensic analyst from Abuja, was called in by the petitioners’ lead counsel, Chris Uche.

Under cross-examination, the witness told the court that he had prepared a forensic report of the presidential election after inspecting 110 BVAS equipment in Abuja.

He told the Court that the BVAS devices used in the 2023 presidential elections, which he inspected, had all their results intentionally deleted.

Under cross-examination by counsel to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, 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.

To this end, the witness told the court that 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 but Nwala said it is against the ethics of his profession to collect the BVAS machine in the open within the court for examination.

The witness also 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.

Counsel to the All Progressives Congress, Mr Lateef Fagbemi, told the witness that neither he nor any of his team members 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 Olanipekun, 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.

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 the election.

After the witness was discharged, Atiku and PDP tendered a series of EC8A forms certified true copies for Ogun with 20 LGAs, Ondo with 17 LGAs, Jigawa with 27 LGA and Rivers with 20 LGAs as evidence which Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani admitted as exhibits in evidence.

Justice Haruna Tsammani subsequently adjourned the hearing of the petition until Friday.

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