South African authorities are deporting Polish immigrant Janusz Walus, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani, to his homeland. All the costs of the deportation process will be borne by the Polish government, said Minister in the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa Khumbudzo Ntshavheniová, reports TASR according to the AP and PAP agencies.
Walus was a truck driver and an activist of the neo-Nazi African Resistance Movement. He shot Hani in front of his house in 1993 in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg. The murder threatened the peaceful transition from white minority rule to democracy.
Hani was the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the general secretary of the South African Communist Party. It is believed that the head of the National Party planned the murder (NP) Clive Derby-Lewis. Both the murderer and the politician were sentenced to death. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, when South Africa became a democracy and the death penalty was abolished.
Derby-Lewis was paroled in 2015 and died of cancer in 2016. The Constitutional Court ruled on Waluso’s (71) conditional release from Kgosi Mampuru II prison in November 2022. A few days before his expected release, he was stabbed by a fellow inmate and had to be hospitalized. According to the government, he should have served the remainder of his sentence on parole in the Republic of South Africa instead of being deported to his native Poland.
Walus had his South African citizenship revoked in prison in 2017. The announcement of his deportation was met with criticism from the South African Communist Party and the ANC. According to them, Walus he never showed remorse for his act, nor did he provide all the information about the murder, including the person who ordered it.
