Fresh uncertainty clouds the ongoing Mohbad paternity dispute after two of three court-selected labs refused to test DNA on his embalmed body.
The setback, revealed on Wednesday by Oladayo Ogungbe, counsel to the Aloba family, has cast doubt on the February 24, 2026, court order issued by Magistrate B.A. Sonuga at the Ikorodu Magistrate Court. That directive was meant to settle once and for all whether Mohbad’s widow, Wunmi Aloba, gave birth to his biological son, Liam.
The problem is technical but insurmountable for the chosen facilities: Mohbad’s remains were embalmed shortly after his sudden death on September 12, 2023. Embalming chemically preserves tissue, making standard DNA extraction from swabs or blood impossible.
Instead, laboratories would need to cut into deep tissue samples, a specialized post-mortem procedure that the two labs say they are simply not equipped to perform.
The three laboratories had been selected with painstaking care to guarantee neutrality. DNA Diagnostics Centre was proposed by the applicant in the suit. Alpha Bio Labs was nominated by Wunmi Aloba herself. The third, Advanced Histopathology Laboratory Limited, was the court’s own choice.
Yet Ogungbe told the court that both Alpha Bio Labs and Advanced Histopathology Laboratory Limited have formally written back stating they lack the capacity for embalmed-body DNA analysis.
In an affidavit already filed before Magistrate Sonuga, the Aloba family counsel pushed back hard against growing online accusations. “It is incorrect and misleading,” Ogungbe stated, “to claim that Mr. Joseph Aloba, the father of the deceased, deliberately hand-picked incompetent laboratories.” The affidavit seeks to correct what the family describes as a deliberate distortion of facts that has been circulating on social media and in some blogs.
The development comes more than two and a half years after Mohbad’s death—a period marked by public grief, protests, police investigations into alleged bullying by his former record label, and an exhumation that never happened because the body had already been embalmed and buried.
Throughout, the question of Liam’s paternity has remained a painful flashpoint between the late singer’s widow and his parents, Joseph and Abosede Aloba.
Legal watchers say the court now faces limited options. It could order fresh nominations of laboratories with forensic capabilities for preserved remains, direct that tissue samples be taken under strict judicial supervision and sent abroad, or even consider alternative scientific methods.
Any further delay, however, risks deepening the emotional wounds for a family already fractured by loss and suspicion.
For millions of Mohbad’s fans who still stream his breakout tracks “Peace” and “Kuku” daily, the latest twist feels like another chapter in a tragedy that refuses to end.
What began as a demand for truth about a young father’s legacy has now become a forensic and legal quagmire centered on the very body that can no longer speak for itself.
The Ikorodu Magistrate Court has not yet fixed a date for the next hearing, but sources close to the matter say all parties have been asked to return with proposals on how to move the test forward.
Until then, the DNA that could have brought closure remains trapped inside an embalmed body that two approved Nigerian laboratories have refused to touch.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Two of the three court-approved laboratories have refused to perform the paternity DNA test on Mohbad’s embalmed body because they lack the specialized capability to extract viable DNA from embalmed tissue.
This technical limitation—not deliberate sabotage or incompetence—has stalled the court-ordered process, leaving Liam’s paternity unresolved more than two years after the singer’s death.
