The Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday granted the Federal Government\u2019s application to shield witnesses in the ongoing trial of the former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd).
\nDasuki is standing trial on a seven-count charge of theft of federal government\u2019s sophisticated weapons, illegal possession of firearms and money laundering.
\nRuling on the federal government\u2019s application, Justice Ahmed Mohammed, said the witnesses would be shielded from the press and the general public.
\nThe judge, however, said that such witnesses would be visible to him, (the judge), the defendant, the prosecution as well as members of the defence teams.
\nAccording to the judge, the application was in order since Section 232 (4) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 allowed the prosecution to protect its witnesses in cases involving economic and financial crimes.
\n\u201cSection 232 (4) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act permits the use of a screen in a charge of economic and financial crimes; and money laundering is part of the charges instituted against the defendant.
\n\u201cTherefore, the request is in order, especially when it has not been shown that it will prejudice against the defendant,\u201d Justice Mohammed declared.
\nThe judge therefore dismissed the objection by Dasuki\u2019s lead counsel, Mr. Ahmed Raji (SAN), who had argued that the application constituted an abuse of court process.
\nRaji based his argument on the grounds that a similar application filed by the prosecution in the same case had been dismissed by the former trial judge, Justice Adeniyi Ademola.
\nThe prosecuting counsel, Oladipo Okpeseyi, had on May 11 filed an application praying the court to order that witnesses in the matter be protected.
\nThe same application has been argued before Justice Ademola but he did not deliver a ruling before the matter was transferred to another court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday granted the Federal Government\u2019s application to shield witnesses in the ongoing trial of the former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd). Dasuki is standing trial on a seven-count charge of theft of federal government\u2019s sophisticated weapons, illegal possession of firearms and money laundering. Ruling on the federal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-default"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}