An FCT High Court in Jabi adjourned Thursday to October 6-7 the trial of the former Secretary of the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal.
Babachir is charged with 10 counts border on on fraud, criminal conspiracy to embezzle over 544 million naira owned by the federal government, in the award of the contract in elimination of evasive plant species in the North-East.
The EFCC also invoiced Hamidu, the younger brother of ex-SGF, Suleiman Abubakar, Apeh Monday and two companies – Rholavision Engineering Limited and Josmon Technologies Limited.
At the resumption of the hearing scheduled for Thursday for the cross-examination before Judge Charles Agbaza, the third prosecution witness, Fatima Umar, a deputy director, head of the digital forensics laboratory, EFCC, spoke, to be cross-examined by Babchir’s lawyer, Akin Olujinmi, SAN.
During cross-examination, Umar confirmed that as a digital expert, she knew that the Internet offered various possibilities in terms of use.
Additionally, she admitted to being aware of the activities of hackers on the Internet and their ability to take hold of a third party device without physically touching it or without the owner’s consent or permission.
Umar said, however, that before a device is hacked and data is transferred using the Bluetooth function, the pairing of the devices must first be done before data transfer can be enabled. , which ultimately means that the owner of the device will be aware of the transfer.
Olujimi, for his part, asked Umar to confirm that it was possible that if the phone was in the possession of someone else besides the owner, such pairing and subsequent data transfer could be done without his knowledge.
In her response, she said yes, but however said that was not the case in the existing lawsuit.
According to Olujimi, he said it was possible that the phone that was taken from a Musa Bulani by a certain Ibrahim Ahmad, an EFCC member in November 2017, did not reach Umar until March 9, 2018.
So he asked Umar to confirm the chain of custody during this period and the possibility that the phone was not tampered with and incriminating evidence settled in.
She confirmed that the phone was in full working order when brought in for data retrieval and analysis, along with consent, specific analysis and chain of custody forms.
Umar said she had to interact with the owner of the phone as he needed to be brought to the lab because the phone had an access code.
He was brought to the lab because in the consent form which was supposed to know the status and information of the device, whether he had a password or not and in this case.
“When filling out the form, he included a password that was wrong, so I asked to be made to give the correct password,” she explained.
Olujimi, in response to his response, said that the evidence in Exhibit Eight, which was a letter sent to Umar to extract and analyze information from the phone, was only the consent form.
He also pointed out that proof that the phone was a password was not in any documents in court.
Concluding his testimony, he asked Umar if she could hack another person’s phone with her knowledge as a digital forensics expert. She replied in the affirmative, but added “not in this case”.
At the end of Olujimi’s cross-examination, Judge Agbaza adjourned the case until October 6 and 7 for the continued cross-examination of the witness by the four remaining defense lawyers.
the The Nigerian News Agency (NAN) reports that on the last adjourned date the court had issued a ruling on the objection raised by the lawyer of the ex-SGF, Olujimi, concerning certain documents that the prosecution asked to produce.
In its decision, the court rejected the documents on the grounds that the conditions for their admissibility were not met by the prosecution.
The offense, the EFCC alleged that the defendants had committed during Lawal’s time as SGF and that he would have awarded contracts to those companies in which he had an interest.
However, they pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
