{"id":82467,"date":"2026-02-05T05:48:59","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T05:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=82467"},"modified":"2026-02-05T05:48:59","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T05:48:59","slug":"court-rejects-defence-evidence-in-sowore-cyberbullying-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2026\/02\/05\/court-rejects-defence-evidence-in-sowore-cyberbullying-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Court Rejects Defence Evidence in Sowore Cyberbullying Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Federal High Court in Abuja on Wednesday rejected documents tendered by the defence in the ongoing cyberbullying trial of activist and publisher, Omoyele Sowore, ruling that they were inadmissible.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Mohammed Umar held that the documents could not be admitted through the prosecution\u2019s first witness, who had earlier told the court he was unaware of their contents, and consequently marked them rejected.<\/p>\n<p>Sowore is facing a two-count amended charge under the Cybercrimes Act for allegedly describing President Bola Tinubu as a \u201ccriminal\u201d in a social media post made on August 25, 2025.<\/p>\n<p>The post followed Tinubu\u2019s statement during a visit to Brazil that corruption in Nigeria had ended under his administration.<\/p>\n<p>During cross-examination, defence counsel, Marshal Abubakar, sought to tender online publications on alleged corruption cases involving public institutions and officials, including reports of dismissals within the Department of State Services and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.<\/p>\n<p>The prosecution, led by Akinlolu Kehinde (SAN), objected, arguing that the documents were irrelevant to the charge and did not comply with Section 84 of the Evidence Act.<\/p>\n<p>In his ruling, Justice Umar upheld the objection and rejected the documents. Similar attempts by the defence to tender reports on Nigeria\u2019s corruption ranking and past statements allegedly made by Tinubu against former presidents were also rejected.<\/p>\n<p>The case was adjourned until March 5, 2026, for continuation of cross-examination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata The Federal High Court in Abuja on Wednesday rejected documents tendered by the defence in the ongoing cyberbullying trial of activist and publisher, Omoyele Sowore, ruling that they were inadmissible. Justice Mohammed Umar held that the documents could not be admitted through the prosecution\u2019s first witness, who had earlier told the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":82468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,1386,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-judiciary","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82469,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82467\/revisions\/82469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}