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<\/p>\nJustice Abubakar Yahaya led two other justices of the appellate court to void the proceedings leading to the conviction and sentencing.<\/p>\n
NAN reports that the judgment given on April 18 on appeal marked CA\/A\/791\/2017 was contained in an enrolled order made available to newsmen by Mr Mahmud Magaji (SAN), Counsel for the appellant (Sani) on Thursday in Abuja.<\/p>\n
The appellate court was of the view that the appellant was denied fair hearing in the trial.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe proceedings and judgment of the special court martial in respect of charge No: NA\/COAS\/GI\/39\/16 filed before the lower Special Court Martial is hereby set aside.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn order is made for the retrial of the charges against the appellant by another Special Court Martial\u2019\u2019, Yahaya held.<\/p>\n
Speaking with newsmen, Magaji said: \u201cby this decision, setting aside the judgment of the Special Court Martial, the proceedings, conviction and sentence of the court never existed in the eyes of the law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are null and void. Therefore, the Nigerian Army is obligated to obey the judgment by restoring the appellant to his rank as a Major General with all his benefits and entitlements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sani was arraigned on July 4, 2016 on a nine-count charge bordering on service property, making of false documents and cheating.<\/p>\n
The alleged offence were punishable under Sections 56(2), 66(a), 90(a) and 113(3) of the Armed Forces Act (AFA), CAP A20, LFN, 2004.<\/p>\n
The charge was a full out from an alleged criminal role he played in the management of a large parcel of land allocated to the Nigerian Army in Asokoro area of the FCT.<\/p>\n
He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment and in the course of the arraignment, count 9 was struck out for being duplication of count 3.<\/p>\n
At the close of the prosecution\u2019s case, the appellant made a no-case submission in respect of all the remaining 8 counts.<\/p>\n
The Court Martial, in a ruling on the no-case submission, struck out count 5 on the grounds that the prosecution failed to establish a prima facie case linking the appellant with the alleged unlawful act.<\/p>\n
The appellant also challenged the jurisdiction of the Court Martial on alleged contravention of Section 36 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended).<\/p>\n
Sani further challenged the competence of the president of the special court and a member and other issues bordering on his right to fair hearing, which were eventually dismissed.\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Court of Appeal Abuja has set aside the decision of a Special Military Court Martial to convict former Chief of Transformation and Innovation at the Nigerian Army Headquarters, Maj.- Gen. Ibrahim Sani. Justice Abubakar Yahaya led two other justices of the appellate court to void the proceedings leading to the conviction and sentencing. NAN […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":106720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2830,3],"tags":[10502,8886],"class_list":["post-110777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law","category-news","tag-appeal-court","tag-court-martial"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/106720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}