A cellphone expert’s testimony kicked off the Judicial Conduct Tribunal, which is responsible for investigating sexual harassment allegations against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge.
The tribunal, which comes after close to a four-month hiatus since its last hearing in January, is sitting in Johannesburg.
The hearing is a result of a complaint by the Makhana High Court judge’s secretary, Andiswa Mengo, that Mbenenge made sexual advances towards her.
Previously, Mengo told the tribunal that Mbenenge used his power to violate her by sending explicit pictures of his hairy private part.
On Monday, the tribunal started with a testimony from Francois Möller, a cellphone expert who analysed data from the phones of the two.
He stated that the original information that was retrieved from the phones cannot be tampered with.
He further told the tribunal that he was given three numbers that he had to look into, one belonging to Mbenenge and two belonging to Mengo.
“I received two phones, a Samsung S20 that belonged to Judge Mbenenge and a Samsung Galaxy A12 that belonged to Miss Mengo,” Möller said.
“In the forensic world, we cannot say that we are certain we will be able to download every little piece of information, because the more one uses their device, the more difficult it gets for us to retrieve some things.”
Proceedings adjourned
According to the expert, Mengo’s cellphone number was saved as “Andy Mengo”, while Mbenenge’s number was saved as “JP”.
“On the A12, the WhatsApp that was active was not registered under any of the numbers that were submitted as belonging to Miss Mengo.
“It is possible that a person creates a WhatsApp account with one number; after the activation, they remove the SIM card and use a different number.
“WhatsApp will keep running with the old number; I know this happens in a lot of criminal cases.”
As he continued with his testimony, the presiding officer, retired judge Bernard Ngoepe, highlighted his unhappiness with pagination.
Ngoepe said the panel was struggling to follow the witness’ testimony because the pages in their possession do not align with the witness’ pages.
He called for an adjournment for the evidence leader, advocate Salome Scheepers, to get the correct pages that would be aligned with the witness’ pages.
