A forensic examiner told the FCT High Court in Abuja on Monday that a passport bearing the name Tali Shani, presented in a London property ownership case involving senior lawyer Mike Ozekhome, was forged.
Bamaiyi Mairiga, an official of the Department of Forensic Examination of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), said, “In this particular case, the data page of the Nigerian international e-passport bearing the surname Shani, other names Tali and passport number A07535463 is a forged data page.”
Mr. Mairiga is the second prosecution witness in the alleged forgery case, and his testimony speaks to one of the charges the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) preferred against Mr. Ozekhome and his co-defendant, Ponfa Useni.
Mr. Useni is a son of the late Jeremiah Useni, who served as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) during the regime of former military dictator, the late Sani Abacha.
The older Mr. Useni, who died in January 2025, owned the London property in question under the fictitious name Tali Shani, and his purported attempt to transfer its ownership to Mr. Ozekhome allegedly led to the presentation of documents which the property tribunal in London found to be forged to support the false identity of Tali Shani.
On February 27, the Office of the AGF arraigned Messrs Ozekhome and Useni on 12 counts of forgery and impersonation.
According to the charges, the defendants conspired in 2020 alongside the late Jeremiah Useni, a retired general, and made “a false” Nigerian passport with number A07535463 and the name Tali Shani, purporting it to have been issued by the Nigeria Immigration Service, to claim a property in the United Kingdom.
Similarly, the prosecution charged them with “using a false passport to facilitate the claim of the property.”
The prosecution also alleged that Mr. Ozekhome helped Ponfa Useni to impersonate Tali Shani in 2020. Together, they allegedly created a fake “Irrevocable Power of Attorney” to help Mr. Ozekhome claim the property.
They denied all the charges.
The prosecution witness, Mr. Mairiga, took the court through the forensic examination that allegedly revealed the Tali Shani passport to be fake.
He said that in February, the forensic department of the EFCC received a request from the Director of Investigations of the EFCC, Abdulkareem Chukkol, to analyse the data page of a passport.
He said the passport bore the name Tali Shani with passport number A07535463.
According to him, the forensic department analysed the passport using the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) international procedure.
Three technologies were used: Keesing Technologies Document Checker (KTDC), VSC 8000 ICAO Optical Character Recognition (OCR) E-Passport Checker, and Manual Publication/Calculation, the witness said.
He added that the analysis of the data page was carried out to examine the Check Digits (CD). The witness explained that the CD is a single numerical character from 0 to 9 placed after the Date of Birth (DOB), Date of Expiry (DOE) and passport number to check the accuracy and integrity of the data provided on the visual inspection zone of the passport and ensure it matches with that of the machine-readable zones.
He explained that the significance of the CD is to assist immigration officers, border control officers and forensic document examiners in identifying forged and counterfeited data pages.
Mr. Mairiga explained to the court that the KTDC was used to verify the accuracy of the information on the visual inspection zone of the data page, where the image holder on the passport appears and other personalised data are shown.
The forensic department used the VSC 8000 ICAO OCR E-Passport feature to verify the genuineness of the DOB, DOE and passport number.
The Manual Publication/Calculation requires the conversion of letters to numerals and the multiplication of the data on the passport.