Mr. Hitler Nwala, a digital forensics specialist, told the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in Abuja on Thursday how he discovered that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) erased the presidential election results.
As the 25th witness for Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, who is challenging the declaration that President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC, was the winner of the presidential election, Mr. Nwala stood on the box.
The witness claimed, in his testimony to the five-member panel headed by Justice Haruna Tsammani, that the deleted results were stored in the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, or BVAS, machines that were used to conduct the elections.
Atiku and his party had insisted that data from the BVAS machines, which were used to upload polling unit results and register voters, would support their claim that Tinubu won the presidential election.
Mr. Nwala claimed that he was summoned to testify in the case by subpoena, as evidenced by Chief Chris Uche, SAN, the petitioners' lead attorney.
He told the court that he specifically looked at and looked over 110 BVAS that were used for the presidential election in Abuja, which was in the Federal Capital Territory, or FCT.
As per him, upon his enquiry, the electing body kept up with that it needed to clear off the data in the BVAS to have the option to redeploy them for the Governorship and State Places of Gathering decisions that hung on Walk 18.
However, counsel for INEC, Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, criticized the witness's report during cross-examination, highlighting that the 110 BVAS devices used for the election were insufficient to demonstrate any irregularity on the Commission's part.
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