The former police officer who broke down at the Palazzolo inquiry on Monday has been admitted to a clinic, the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court heard on Tuesday.
Abraham Smith was to have testified at the inquiry, in which questions from Italian prosecutors are being put to a series of South African witnesses.
The answers will be used as evidence in Palermo, Italy, in the trial in absentia of alleged Mafia boss Vito Palazzolo, who is living in South Africa.
On Tuesday, Smith’s attorney, Andre Roux, told magistrate Derek Winter that his client has been hospitalised.
”He’s been taken up to hospital in a clinic, I understand,” he said.
”I have a report from a clinical psychologist. The conclusion that he came to is that Mr Smith is [at present] unfit to testify.”
On Monday, before he became so overwrought that he was unable to continue, Smith told the court he had been boarded from the police with post-traumatic stress and was being treated by a psychologist.
On Tuesday, another witness, former commander of the elite presidential investigation task unit Andre Lincoln, told the court that Smith, then with the organised crime intelligence unit, had led a 1996 raid on Palazzolo’s farm in a search for other Mafia figures.
Lincoln also quoted from a 1997 letter he wrote to then deputy president Thabo Mbeki, saying he suspected Smith had been secretly recruited by the Italian anti-Mafia police.
He said Smith had plotted with members of the organised crime unit to implicate Palazzolo in petty crime.
Smith, the letter said, had also conspired to kidnap the Italian and to kill him.
Smith had chosen to tell the Italian police that Palazzolo funded the African National Congress’s 1994 election campaign, and that the South African government was protecting him. — Sapa