Trial for the murder of Rupert Berney Appasamy |17 May 2022
Court gets digital forensic examination report
The court yesterday received digital forensic examination report, precisely extraction from phones, in the ongoing trial for the murder of Rupert Berney Appasamy whose completely decomposed body was found shallowly buried at Bougainville, Takamaka on September 23, 2021.
The evidence was being given by a police inspector from the digital forensic section of the Scientific Support and Crime Record Bureau (SSCRB) who shared digital extracts in the form of call logs from four out of the seven mobile phones which have been labelled as exhibits in the case.
The two accused in the case, which is being presided over by Justice Mohan Niranjit Burhan, are Sindu Parekh and Ken Jean-Charles who are being represented by lawyers Tony Juliette and Olivier Chang-Leng respectively, while Corrine Rose and Georges Thachet are the prosecution lawyers.
To begin the session, the witness noted that the three mobile phones submitted last week as exhibits in court did not contain any relevant facts in relation to the case, while during yesterday’s hearing, he produced an additional four phones – two from accused Jean-Charles and two from a former accused in the case – which underwent digital extraction at the SSCRB digital forensic laboratory.
He said out of the two phones retrieved from Jean-Charles, the numerical extraction process through the Universal Forensics Extraction Device (UFED) which is a product series of the Israeli company Cellebrite used for the extraction and analysis of data from mobile devices by law enforcement agencies.
The officer explained that between September 10 and 21, 2021 a total of 57 call logs was extracted from one of the phones confiscated from Jean-Charles communicating with a particular number.
As for the second phone, following extraction process, ten images were captured, two of which showed names of the second accused in the case – Parekh – and the deceased (Appasamy).
He added that software, precisely the XRY which is a digital forensics and mobile device forensics product by the Swedish company MSAB, is used to analyse and recover information from mobile devices such as mobile phones, smart phones, GPS navigation tools and tablet computers.
The XRY is designed to recover the contents of a device in a forensic manner so that the contents of the data can be relied upon by the user.
In his evidence before the court, the officer also produced two additional mobile phones belonging to the former accused in the case.
He explained that one out of the two cell phones was damaged and therefore no extraction could be made, while a file system data extraction was carried out on the second.
It is to note that since the beginning of the case last Monday, a total of seven mobile phones have been brought before the court as evidence in the case.
Roland Duval