Prosecutors of the case of alleged coup plot have presented WhatsApp chats that took place among some of the accused persons in court.
Kabral Mohammed Ayembila, the 11th Prosecution Witness, is a Cybersecurity and Digital Forensic Officer with 12 years of experience at the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB).
On Monday, April 11, 2022, Kabral Ayembilla in his evidence in chief, told the court, led by Prosecutor Winifred Sarpong, that on October 14, 2019, he received a written request attached to a Court order from the NIB's investigation department through its Director to extract information from ten mobile phones and three tablets.
He told the Court that the devices bore the names of the accused and others, including Bright Debrah, Callister Ziaba, Col. Gameli, Ezor Kafui, and Dr. Frederick MacPalm.
The Witness testified before a three-judge panel that he and his team successfully extracted material/data from 11 of the 13 devices.
According to him, the extraction device was unable to access two devices: a Samsung notebook 2 and an iPad mini.
He added that together with his team they retrieved "call logs, contacts, pdf files, word files, audio, video, and WhatsApp chats."
According to Mr Ayembila, all of the extracted data was "placed on an external hard drive" and returned to the "NIB investigation department via the Director of National Intelligence Bureau."
He stated that the investigation team contacted him and his team again after analyzing the retrieved data in order to print some from the hard drive. He added that the printed data came from Dr. Frederick MacPalm's Samsung Galaxy S7, which was the only phone with data relevant to the investigation.
It “was WhatsApp chats between Dr. Frederick MacPalm and some numbers saved as ACP Dr. Benjamin, Dr. Sam, Zikpi Gam, and a WhatsApp group by name Take Action Ghana Executive platform. The extraction team went ahead to print out the chats without media, because they requested for only chat and per the extraction device, media files are separated from chats.”
Under cross-examination, the witness later told the Court that, while a very simple and modern computer could have been used to extract the data, an extraction device was used "to ensure the integrity of the data for the purposes of investigation."
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