TIMELINE: Janusz Walus – from killing Hani to parole
The Constitutional Court has ordered that Chris Hani’s killer, Polish immigrant Janusz Walus, be released on parole by no later than Wednesday, 30 November.
The man who killed the former SACP leader has been at the centre of controversy for decades, and the tripartite alliance is furious that he will be let out of jail, but what preceded this?
Hani’s killing
In 1993, SACP leader, Chris Hani, was killed at his home in Boksburg, and Walus was arrested shortly afterwards.
Walus is Polish and came to the country in the 1980s, and was linked to the Conservative Party Member of Parliament Clive Derby-Lewis.
It was later found Derby-Lewis supplied the gun Walus used to murder Hani.
At the TRC, Walus admitted to shooting Hani in front of his daughter.
Both Walus and Derby-Lewis were convicted of the murder and sentenced to death – sentences that would later be commuted to life in prison.
The resulting unrest
Hani was an icon of the struggle and his death, so shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and as South Africa was moving from one dispensation to another, was tantamount to a spark in a shouldering cauldron of racial tensions.
Thousands protested, and wanted an armed response.
In a historic moment of statesmanship, Nelson Mandela addressed the nation live on television calling for calm – and averting a potential civil war.
On Repentance
Both Walus and Derby-Lewis applied for amnesty at the TRC, but it was found that they did not reveal the whole truth about who was behind the decision to have Hani assassinated.
In one of his several parole attempts, Walus also apologized to the Hani family, but this apology was consistently rejected for the same reason.
Derby-Lewis took his secrets to the grave
In 2016, Clive Derby-Lewis died at the age of 80 from lung cancer. He had been released on medical parole a year prior when doctors determined his illness was terminal.
A year before that, both Derby-Lewis and Walus were attacked in jail by an offender with a spoon and suffered lacerations on their heads and hands at the Kgosi Mampuru Correctional Centre in Pretoria.
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