It also does not seem to me that the prosecution succeeded in proving
that the accused actually forged the land documents.
The evidence
adduced before me reveals that the Prosecution did not follow through
on the lead given by the accused person that it was one Surveyor
Akinyemi that gave him the land documents to sell. The PW3 merely
stated that she called the telephone number furnished by the accused
person but could not get through to Surveyor Akinyemi, and that the
accused is being held responsible because he could not produce
Surveyor Akinyemi.
The PW3 equally conceded that she did not get
across to Lugard I. Edegbe whose name appears as the signatory of the
offer letters to confirm whether or not he signed them but insisted that
they wrote to AMAC attaching the documents for them to confirm the
genuineness and AMAC's response was that they are not genuine, even
as the PW1 testified under cross examination that it does not occur to
him that the accused person authored the letters of offer attached to his
petition (i.e. Exhibit P1).
In a criminal prosecution alleging forgery of documents, it is needful for
the prosecution to call a handwriting analyst to show that the hand
writing of the person who is alleged to have forged the documents is
the same as the one on the forged documents where the supposed
alteration was made, even as the person whose signature or handwriting
is forged is a material witness. See ALAKE v. STATE (1992) 9 NWLR
(PT. 265) 260 at 270 (per Kutigi, JSC ); WAMBAI & ANOR. v. KANO
N. A. (1965) NMLR 15 and WAMBAI v. KANONA (1965) NMLR 15."
OBIOMA v. STATE (2013) LPELR-20647 (per Okoro, JCA as he
then was).
In the instant case, since the prosecution neither called a
handwriting expert nor the persons whose signatures appear in the land
documents allegedly forged, it is obvious that they have failed to
establish that the accused person forged the documents as alleged. I
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