Mentor concerned over safety

FORMER ANC parliamentarian Vytjie Mentor raised concerns about her safety while she testifies at the commission of inquiry into state capture after she found her hotel room had been breached.

A tearful Mentor told commission chairman Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo she did not want to sound like an alarmist, but she could not return to a hotel room she did not feel safe in.

She said she discovered that the door ledger was broken two nights ago and alerted the hotel. When she returned from the commission she found it was fixed.

Upon leaving her hotel room yesterday morning, she realised she had left her glasses behind.

“I then turned back to my room… the room is accessible using a card. The door would not open with the card.

“I then decided to see if it would open without using the card, and it did. If I had not forgotten my glasses, I would have come here having left a room that is unlocked… “I am worried about going back to a room that I don’t know who accessed it and what might happen,” she said.

Zondo assured Mentor that her safety came first and instructed head of the legal team Paul Pretorius and the commission’s secretary, Khotso de Wee, to liaise with her and her lawyers to find safer alternative accommodation.

Mentor is the third witness at the inquiry.