Dr. Frederick MacPalm
PROSECUTION yesterday tendered into evidence a mobile phone belonging to Dr. Frederick MacPalm, the alleged mastermind of a coup plot to overthrow government.
The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge was part of some 13 devices that were forwarded to the Cyber Security and Digital Forensic Unit of the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) for extraction of data, following the arrest of the accused, for their alleged involvements in the plot to topple a democratically elected government.
The prosecution’s 11th witness, Kabral Mohammed Ayembila, who conducted the extraction of the data and information on the devices, tendered the mobile phone as well as two reports on the forensic analysis conducted on the 13 devices.
Led in his evidence-in-chief by Winifred Sarpong, a Principal State Attorney, the witness told the court that on October 14, 2019, he received a written request from the investigation department of the NIB to examine some electronic devices, and these were accompanied by a court order.
He said the devices comprised 10 mobile phones and three tablets, with the names of the accused persons. Out of the 13 devices, they were able to extract data and information from 11 of them, but could not do same from a Samsung Notebook 2 and an iPad mini.
“The data extracted include call logs, contacts, PDF files, Word files, audio, video, and WhatsApp chats. All of these extracted data was put on an external hard drive, and all the phones were put back in an envelope, sealed. I issued a report, and submitted to the investigation department of NIB, through the Director of National Intelligence Bureau,” the witness told the court.
Mr. Ayembila narrated that after the investigation team had done an analysis of the data, they requested a printed copy of the data extracted from the Samsung Galaxy S7 device, as it was the only phone that had data relevant to the investigation team’s case.
“The technical team went ahead to print the data. This data 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. And all the data was found on Samsung Galaxy S7 phone belonging to Dr. Frederick MacPalm,” the witness told the court.
He added that the extraction team went ahead to print out the chats without media, because they requested for only chats and per the extraction device, media files are separated from chats.
BY Gibril Abdul Razak