Firebrand MP Patricia de Lille was seized by a "moment of utter craziness" when she made "reckless" allegations that senior ANC leaders were spies for the apartheid government, Justice Minister Penuell Maduna said yesterday.

"She belongs in the loony bin if you ask me," Maduna said of the Independent Democrats leader.

He launched a bitter attack on De Lille after saying that President Thabo Mbeki had excused him from the Hefer spy probe after De Lille failed to co-operate with the commission.

De Lille "was given an opportunity to place the so-called tonnages of information about me and the others whose names she rattled off here in 1998," he told the National Assembly yesterday.

"I can tell this house that that is why the president has decided that my name must be removed from the terms of reference (of the Hefer Commission) because she has not been helpful at all."

De Lille refused to appear before the commission after Mbeki broadened the original terms of reference to include a probe into whether Maduna was a spy or not.

This week, Mbeki again altered the commission's terms, this time excluding Maduna and specifically fingering former transport minister Mac Maharaj and foreign affairs adviser Mo Shaik for their allegations that Scorpions boss Bulelani Ngcuka was a spy.

De Lille was not in parliament to hear Maduna's tirade.

"He's really irritating me and he's threatening to take me to court. Whatever he wants to do, let him do as he pleases," she said in a telephonic interview.

Asked whether she stood by her allegations that Maduna was a spy, De Lille said: "I'm not going to engage Penuell Maduna."

Maduna has on numerous occasions threatened to haul De Lille before the courts for allegedly repeating outside of the parliamentary chamber - and therefore without the protection of parliamentary privilege - that he was a spy.

Maduna made the remarks about De Lille while answering a parliamentary question about whether the allegations against Ngcuka made by Maharaj and Shaik had had an impact on the National Prosecuting Authority, of which Ngcuka is the head.

"I doubt if the utterances of the two gentlemen have had any negative effect on the institution as such - the institution is functioning maximally," Maduna said.

"The institution has been assured by the president himself directly here in the house, and by the president through me, that their work continues. The utterances by Maharaj and Shaik were limited to Ngcuka, but "we would indeed all want to work in a situation where people do not make these reckless remarks about others unless they can prove them."

With acknowledgements to Jeremy Michaels and the Cape Times.