A senior National Hospital, Abuja oncologist is now on trial for allegedly forging the medical report that helped secure former Kaduna Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s health-based bail, a document the hospital says it never authorized and can find no matching patient record for.
The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) on Friday filed a four-count charge against Bello Abubakar, a consultant radiation oncologist, accusing him of knowingly producing a false medical report and misrepresenting it as an official National Hospital document to help Mr. El-Rufai secure bail in a separate corruption case before the Kaduna State High Court.
According to the charge sheet, the document at the center of the case, titled “Medical Report and Expert Opinion for Urgent Medical Intervention” and dated 10 June 2026, was drafted by Mr. Abubakar despite his knowing its contents were untrue.
He is accused of having the report sworn before a commissioner for oaths in Kaduna before it was filed in support of Mr. El-Rufai’s bail bid in the case marked KDH/KAD/ICPC/02/2026.
Prosecutors allege the fabrication did not stop with Mr. Abubakar. The third count in the charge accuses him of conspiring with one Aliyu Bala to concoct the false information, with the report allegedly written specifically so Mr. Bala could depose a supporting affidavit for the bail application, an arrangement prosecutors say amounts to a coordinated scheme rather than a single act of professional misconduct.
The charges span both the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000, and the Penal Code:
- Count One: Giving false information with intent to mislead a public officer, under Section 17(1)(c) of the Corrupt Practices Act.
- Count Two: Using his position as a medical consultant to confer an unfair advantage on himself through the false report, under Section 19 of the same Act.
- Count Three: Conspiring with Aliyu Bala to fabricate the information used in the supporting affidavit, contrary to Section 79 of the Penal Code.
- Count Four: Dishonestly making a false document and presenting it as carrying the authority of the National Hospital, contrary to Sections 362 and 364 of the Penal Code.
Central to the prosecution’s case is expected testimony from the National Hospital’s Chief Medical Director, Raji Mahmud, who investigators say will tell the court that Mr. Abubakar issued the report without conducting any medical examination and simply handed it to the El-Rufai family for use in the bail proceedings.
The hospital’s own internal check appears to undercut the report’s legitimacy. Per the CMD’s account, staff searched the Electronic Medical Records system using multiple variations of Mr. El-Rufai’s name and cross-referenced everyone who visited the Oncology clinic in the first two weeks of June 2026, the period the report was dated to.
They found no matching record. Compounding the problem, the report itself carried no hospital number and no personal phone number for the patient, making independent verification of any visit, receipt, or departmental record effectively impossible.
The CMD has further stated that hospital management only learned of the report’s existence when the ICPC produced it and that despite being written on National Hospital letterhead, the document had no institutional backing or authorization.
Mr. Abubakar, for his part, has given investigators a markedly different account of his relationship with the former governor.
In his statement, he maintains that Mr. El-Rufai has been a registered patient at the National Hospital since 2005, well before his own arrival on staff in 1999 would suggest overlap, and that many of their consultations went undocumented because, in his assessment, they didn’t rise to the level of formal clinical discussions requiring paperwork.
He says he formally documented no more than four consultations with Mr. El-Rufai between 2017 and 2025 and that in the more recent 2025–2026 window, he consulted for the former governor three times while El-Rufai was in ICPC custody twice at the commission’s own detention facility and once at the National Hospital itself.
That account collides directly with the CMD’s version of events. Mahmud has reportedly told investigators that, to his knowledge, Mr. El-Rufai was registered as a hospital patient only as of 7 July 2026 and that he was not otherwise aware El-Rufai had any patient history at the institution at all. The near two-decade gap between the two men’s timelines is likely to be a central point of contention if the case goes to trial.
The ICPC has named two principal witnesses its own investigator, Olugbemi Osanoto, and the hospital’s CMD, Raji Mahmud, alongside a representative of the Kaduna State High Court and unspecified additional witnesses to be produced by subpoena.
The exhibits list offers a glimpse into the paper trail investigators have assembled: extrajudicial statements from Mr. Abubakar dated 9 and 14 July 2026; a statement from the CMD dated 10 July 2026; hospital correspondence dated 18 June and 10 July 2026; and, notably, a wallet deposit record dated 7 July 2026, a detail that, while unexplained in the charge sheet itself, suggests financial transactions may yet feature in the commission’s broader case.
The forgery charge against Mr. Abubakar is only the latest thread in a sprawling legal entanglement facing Mr. El-Rufai.
The former governor is already contending with a Federal High Court prosecution in Kaduna over an alleged ₦8.68 billion CCTV surveillance contract fraud dating to his time in office, in addition to the separate Kaduna State High Court case, the one this alleged bail report forgery was meant to support, covering allegations of abuse of office and procurement violations.
Mr. El-Rufai has pleaded not guilty across the various proceedings and has consistently accused federal and Kaduna State authorities of weaponizing the prosecutions to keep him in detention.
Mr. Abubakar has since been arrested by the ICPC in connection with the alleged false statement and now becomes a defendant in his own right, his professional standing and the integrity of the report that once helped make the case for his patient’s release squarely on trial.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
At the heart of this case is a direct contradiction that could determine its outcome: Mr. Abubakar claims Nasir El-Rufai has been his patient since 2005, while the National Hospital’s own CMD says there’s no record of El-Rufai as a patient before July 2026 and a records search turned up nothing matching his name for the period the bail report claims to cover.
If the hospital’s account holds up, it means bail for a sitting corruption defendant was secured using a medical report for a “patient” who, by the institution’s own records, didn’t exist. That’s the key fact to watch as this heads to trial.
