The second prosecution witness (PW2) in the ongoing trial of constitutional lawyer, Professor Mike Ozekhome and one other before the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Bamaiyi Haruna Mairiga, on Monday, asserted that the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) cannot issue passports that do not comply with standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
Ozekhome and Ponfa Useni, a son of the late General Jeremiah Useni, a military era FCT Minister, are being prosecuted before Justice Chizoba Oji, sitting at Maitama, Abuja, by the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation (OAGF) on a 12-count charge bordering on forgery and impersonation.
The prosecution alleged, among others that both Ozekhome and Ponfa Useini conspired in 2020 and made ‘a false Nigerian International Passport No. A07535463 with the name Shani Tali.
According to the prosecution, this was purportedly to have been issued by the Nigeria Immigration Service to claim a property in the United Kingdom.
The prosecution further charged them with using a false passport to facilitate the claim of the property.
The defendants, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge preferred against them.
At the resumed hearing on the case yesterday, Mairiga, while being cross examined by counsel for the Useni, F.R. Onoja SAN, insisted on the distinction he made between forged document and counterfeit document in the course of giving his evidence-in-chief on June 29.
While telling the court that he stands by the distinction he made, Mairiga said his conclusion on the disputed passport in question was that the data page was forged to bear Shani Tali.
According to him, ‘My conclusion is that the data page of passport A07535463 is forged to bear Shani Tali as the holder of the passport.
‘The reason for this is that ICAO has set the standard for forged character between the visual character and machine readable character recognition.
‘What I am saying is that passport number A07535463, date of birth 2nd February, 1973 and expiry date 1st July, 2026 all failed the ICAO optical character recognition test. Hence my conclusion that it was forged to reflect Shani Tali as holder.
The second prosecution witness (PW2) in the ongoing trial of constitutional lawyer, Professor Moke der.
‘The Nigerian Immigration Service cannot issue a document that does not meet ICAO standard for passport recognition.’
The PW2 further told the court that the data page of a passport could be counterfeited, while entries on the page could also be altered and referred to as forged.
He further told the court that the Nigerian passport, which he accepted was a continuous document, was a machine readable document, adding that in conducting forensic analysis of the disputed passport, he consulted the NIS E-passport verification system portal, which he said was designed to check the authenticity of Nigerian passports.
The prosecution witness, however, told the court that he did not make reference to the outcome of the consultation with the NIS E-passport verification system portal in the report of his forensic analysis of the dusputed passport, which was earlier tendered as exhibit before the court, marked Exhibit P7a.
‘In my report, I did not reference the outcome of the consultation with the Nigerian Immigration Service E-passport verification system portal. The reason is that ICAO set standard for all its 193 members. ICAO is superior to NIS,’ Mairiga told the court.
Earlier, under cross examination by the lead counsel for Ozekhome, Tayo Oyetibo SAN, the prosecution witness told the court that he was specifically requested to conduct forensic analysis of the disputed passport to check if the content of the visual zone matched the machine zone.
He said the relevant items for doing this were the passport number, the date of birth of the holder and the date of expiry of the passport and declared that, ‘All these failed the ICAO test.’
Mairiga informed the court that the A series of the Nigeria E-passport at the inception did not carry the National Identification Number (NIN), adding that when the A series passport was run on the ICAO passport document checker with passport number or NIN, it usually returned a pass.
‘When a data page is subjected to the ICAO E-passport document reader, what the system does is that it captures every data in that data page. It shows issuing country and also the sex, surname, given name and nationality of the holder.
‘However, the key element set aside for checking substitution of data or forgery of data are simply the date of expiry, passport number and date of birth,’ the PW2 told the court.
At the end of his cross examination by the defence counsels, the court adjourned further hearing in the case to tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29.