Paralympian and Olympian Oscar Pistorius.
Murder accused Paralympian and Olympian Oscar Pistorius allegedly insulted President Jacob Zuma’s family while at a night club in Sandton over the weekend, the Star reported on Tuesday.
Johannesburg businessperson Jared Mortimer was quoted in the paper claiming that Pistorius insulted Zuma’s family and his own friends, resulting in an altercation on Saturday night.
“I took that personally because I am very good friends with a member of the Zuma family,” he said. Mortimer claimed Pistorius was intoxicated and started to poke him in the chest while they were talking.
He then pushed Pistorius away from him and the athlete fell over a chair. The club’s bouncers helped Pistorius up, but were asked to remove him after he “had a confrontation with another man”, Mortimer said.
The South African Press Association (Sapa) reported on Monday that the athlete was at the club and that Pistorius’s family spokesperson, Anneliese Burgess, gave a different version of events. She said her client was at the VIP section of the club when he was approached by a man who had since been identified as Mortimer.
“The individual, according to my client, started to aggressively interrogate him on matters relating to the trial,” said Burgess. Pistorius is charged with murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day last year. He claims he mistook her for an intruder when he shot her dead through a locked toilet door at his Pretoria home. The state claims he shot her following an argument.
Officials from the VIP Room, which is at the Michelangelo Towers in Sandton, have denied the incident. Spokesperson Perry Mermigas admitted that Pistorius was at the club, but denied that anything out of the ordinary happened. “We are not aware of this,” Mermigas told Sapa. – Sapa