The department of correctional services is investigating how a laptop ended up in Clive Derby-Lewis’s room, after his wife Gaye said the department lied by saying she had brought it in without permission.
“We are conducting an investigation and will therefore be able to report on this matter when the investigation is concluded,” said department spokesperson Phumlani Ximiya on Friday.
In a letter Gaye Derby-Lewis intends delivering to DCS national commissioner Tom Moyane on Monday, she writes: “Firstly, what Manelisi Wolela [DCS spokesperson who issued the statement] said is a lie. I don’t know who informed him of the lie, and who told him to issue a press statement, but it is a lie.”
She said her husband, who had applied for parole from his life sentence for the murder of South African Communist Party general secretary Chris Hani in 1993, asked a friend to bring him in a laptop.
Her husband already had permission by way of a court order to have a computer in his cell in the prison. He thought he could thus use a laptop in his hospital room, and didn’t know it would first have to be vetted by prison officials.
“But someone at DCS had other intentions, hence the press release. I had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH BRINGING IN ANY COMPUTER [sic].
“I happened to be in the hospital room when the friend brought in the laptop,” she writes.
She said it was first checked by warders in the room, then handed to her husband, who was granted special permission to be treated in a private hospital for a leg infection and cancer.
“We left after the visit and that was the last I heard of it. To thus state, as Wolela did, that I attempted to bring my husband a laptop and that I was blocked by security officials is simply not true.”
She said that either the official who informed Wolela was lying, or Wolela “saw an opportunity to vent his malice in what now turns out to be a blatant lie”.
She wants Moyane to set the record straight.
Ximiya said they insisted she brought the laptop in, but following her objection, they would conduct an investigation to see exactly how the laptop came to be in the room.
Complaint
Derby-Lewis also lodged a complaint with the Press Ombudsman over the South African Press Association’s use of the word “smuggled” in the introduction to its news agency report on the DCS statement, and demanded an apology specifically for that.
She said it was distributed so widely that even her son in Canada had seen it.
“They are simply having fun at my expense, and it is even more tragic … because of the very ill condition of my husband!”
The introductory paragraphs in the DCS statement issued at the time read: “An attempt of the wife of offender Clive Derby Lewis to bring him a laptop was blocked by security officials guarding him at the hospital this week.
“Mrs Gaye Derby-Lewis brought a laptop when visiting offender Clive Derby-Lewis at the hospital without following correctional procedures resulting in the laptop being confiscated by the Emergency Support Team.”
Deputy Press Ombudsman Johan Retief dismissed the complaint, informing Mrs Derby-Lewis that the word “smuggle” was materially the same as the wording used by the department.
Derby-Lewis has served 17 years of his sentence for supplying triggerman Janusz Walus with the firearm used to kill Hani. — Sapa