JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa will deport Janusz Walus, a far-right extremist who assassinated anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani in 1993, to his native Poland on Friday, the government said.
Walus, 71, served nearly 30 years of a life sentence for Hani’s murder in a South African prison. In 2022 he was released on parole, sparking protests in South Africa where some said it re-opened deep wounds of racial inequality.
Now that he has finished his parole period in line with a court order, he will be handed over to the Department of Home Affairs for deportation, South African Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told a news briefing.
“This is not a decision of the government. This is a decision of the Constitutional Court, and we are merely abiding by that decision,” she said.
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said the deportation would take place on Friday and would be paid for by the Polish embassy.
Walus emigrated to South Africa in 1981 and held dual South African and Polish citizenship until his South African citizenship was revoked on the basis of the crime.
He told a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s that he had shot Hani “to stop communists and radicals from gaining power in this country”.
Hani, who was a senior member of the African National Congress and head of the South African Communist Party, was gunned down by Walus outside his home in Johannesburg in the final days of apartheid rule.
“At the time of Mr Chris Hani’s assassination, the negotiations for a free and equal South Africa had stalled, and his tragic death forced the negotiating parties to set a date for the first democratic General Elections,” said the South African government in its statement on Friday.
“Every year that we celebrate Freedom Day, as a country we are in large part indebted to Chris Hani.”
(Reporting by Nellie Peyton and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Gareth Jones)