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Festus Keyamo accuses Atiku of parading fake results

By Timileyin Omilana
25 March 2019   |   5:46 pm
Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari's campaign team has accused the People's Democratic Party 2019 presidential candidate, Atiku Abukabar of parading fake results. The campaign team spokesperson, Festus Keyamo, Monday in a petition he sent to the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the State Security Service, said that "some criminally-minded PDP operatives" hacked…

[FILE PHOTO] Festus Keyamo

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari’s campaign team has accused the People’s Democratic Party 2019 presidential candidate, Atiku Abukabar of parading fake results.

The campaign team spokesperson, Festus Keyamo, Monday in a petition he sent to the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the State Security Service, said that “some criminally-minded PDP operatives” hacked the INEC server “to smuggle in fake results into that server.”

“Upon the last-minute postponement of the February 16, 2019 Presidential/National Assembly Elections, the nation was shocked to see already prepared presidential elections results floating around in the cyber space just less than 24 hours after the postponed election was originally billed to hold,” Keyamo said in the petition.

“The fake results had details of the scores of the candidates of the major parties. Of course, the fake results gave victory to the candidate of the PDP, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, even when elections did not hold,” he added.

Keyamo’s accusations came after Abubakar formally approached the tribunal last week to make his case of what he [Abubakar] called a “sham” election.

In the petition sent to the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal in Abuja against the Independent National Electoral Commission, Buhari and the APC as the first to the third respondents, respectively.

The defence stated in its 139-page petition that “from the data in the 1st respondent’s (INEC’s) server…the true, actual and correct results” from “state to state computation” showed that Atiku polled a total of 18,356,732 votes to defeat Buhari whom they said scored 16,741,430 votes.”

The party said the results were the total votes scored by the candidates in 35 states and the Federal Capital Territory Abuja, as there was “no report on sever” about the results from Rivers State as of February 25, 2019.

By this, Atiku claimed to have defeated Buhari with 1,615,302 votes.

However, Keyamo said the party “have access to the INEC server is by the criminal hacking of the server or through the criminal conspiracy of some INEC officials.”

According to Nigeria’s Cybercrime Act 2015, anyone found guilty of unlawfully accessing a computer system or network, they could be fined up to N10 million, imprisoned for 5 years, or both, depending on the purpose of the hack.

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