EFCC witness testifies against Naira Marley in court

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission EFCC brought its second witness to testify against music artiste, Azeez Fashola, popularly known as Naira Marley, on 11 counts of conspiracy, possession of counterfeit cards and fraud on Thursday.

The second prosecution witness, Anosike Augustine, a mobile forensic expert with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) told Justice Nicholas Oweibo of the Federal High Court in Lagos how he analysed the contents of an iPhone 11 allegedly retrieved from Naira Marley during investigation.

He said after extracting and analysing the data on the phone, he produced a report of his findings.

The EFCC subsequently moved to tender in evidence the report which was said to be over 30 pages long.

Counsel to Naira Marley, Olalekan Ojo, however, objected to the tendering of the document.

Ojo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, argued that it was not part of the documents front-loaded to the defence team and he was unaware of its contents.

Following the EFCC’s insistence that the document had been front-loaded, Justice Oweibo adjourned until Friday to allow the parties sort out and reconcile whether the report was front-loaded or not.

Before the testimony of the second witness, the EFCC had called another of its forensic expert, Nuru Buhari.

Mr Buhari, who testified as the first prosecution witness told Justice Oweibo that various stolen credit card information were retrieved from the musician’s laptop.

Apart from the stolen credit card information, website visit history recovered from the device showed that the top five most visited sites dealt with buying and selling stolen credit card information.

The witness also informed the court that suspicious apps that were mostly used by people with shady deals on the internet were found on the laptop.

He said an analysis of the administrator account on the laptop revealed that the admin was one Naira Marley and the account was connected to his iCloud account.