Two of the three foreign laboratories approved by a Lagos magistrate court have refused to perform the DNA testing of Liam, late Mohbad’s son. On Thursday, March 19, 2026, Oladayo Ogungbe, Mohbad’s father Joseph Aloba’s attorney, revealed a technical stall.
The legal team claims that both Alpha Bio Labs in Warrington, UK, and Advanced Histopathology Laboratory Limited in London have officially stated that they do not do postmortem DNA testing on samples taken from embalmed bodies. Three weeks after the facilities were first approved, this technical issue has essentially stopped the court-mandated procedure.
Following initial queries by Joseph Aloba’s representatives to determine whether the institutions had the particular “technical capacity” necessary for such a delicate case, these prominent laboratories declined. The widow, Wunmi, had suggested the Warrington facility, and the Magistrate Court had independently chosen the London lab; nevertheless, the third laboratory, DNA Diagnostics Center in Fairfield, Ohio, USA, is still the only one that hasn’t ruled out the procedure. The main problem is that Mohbad’s body was excavated in September 2023, seven days after he was first buried. Since then, it has undergone a number of forensic and embalming procedures that may have compromised the integrity of genetic material for some common testing procedures.
The ongoing controversy has split the public since the singer’s death in September 2023; this made more complicated by this revelation. While Wunmi’s legal representatives have previously voiced reservations about the transparency of the sample collecting process, Joseph Aloba has remained steadfast in his belief that a DNA test is required to clarify inheritance and lineage difficulties. The court might have to reevaluate its list of approved facilities or look for more specialist forensic genetics labs that can handle postmortem embalmed samples if the two UK labs withdraw.
