Cold, Cold Heart: Chris Hani assassin Janusz Waluś has no regrets

The point-blank range shooting of Hani on the morning of 10 April 1993 had been a political act, he told a 35-minute Annika Larsen special report broadcast on eNCA on Sunday.

“It was necessary, it had to be done,” he said, suggesting he had been a soldier at war. 

He said that there was no reason to continue to “look for a bigger story here” to be used “by members of the ANC against each other”.

While dismissing a wider conspiracy on the part of the apartheid government’s right-wing supporters, Waluś implicated, without naming, elements in military and navy intelligence (Military Intelligence – MI) in a strategy to destabilise the wider political landscape of the time. 

This happened while negotiations between the National Party government and the ANC were taking place.

Waluś said these talks had been “an open discussion about the transfer of power” to which he and others had been opposed.

‘Just the two of us’

Previously, Waluś had maintained that he had acted with only one co-conspirator, the Conservative Party extremist Clive Derby-Lewis, in the plot to kill Hani.

Yet he hinted to Larsen that Derby-Lewis might have been entangled with a deeper state.

However, Waluś admitted to cooperating with MI on other matters, such as collecting information on the white right, but he denied that the Hani assassination plot in any way officially involved MI.

“I was hoping there might be links higher up who can deal with us later on if we got caught … In that way, I thought that … I was 40 years old and had a mind of my own when I did this” he said.

He did regret, however, Derby-Lewis’ long imprisonment for the crime and the links the police had made between Waluś and the politician. Derby-Lewis, too, should have been viewed as a political operative and should have been given amnesty.

Derby-Lewis, suffering from lung cancer, died aged 80 in 2016 in a Pretoria private hospital after being released on medical parole.

The former assassin told Larsen that he knew that “Clive had met with Jacob Zuma. I don’t know what he wanted or why. He was very positively discussed and he looked like he was going to help us, but nothing came of it.”

While Waluś said he had met his MI contact “through friends” and had begun acting as an informer, particularly on some countries in the Warsaw Pact – Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany – where liberation movements had found support, he would never disclose his handlers.

Coming clean

Larsen and her team persuaded Waluś, who was deported to Poland in December 2024, to come clean about his role in the killing of Hani and to clear up any lingering conspiracy theories – particularly concerning the involvement of ANC members opposed to the young leader’s rising star in democratic South Africa. Waluś denied any connection to any liberation movement of the time.

Waluś’ said that this was the first time “that I can speak freely”.

Larsen previously interviewed Waluś’ family in 2011 about the roots of his extremism. Back then they had put it down to his experiences under Communist, Soviet rule.

Waluś pumped four bullets into a surprised Hani who looked his assassin in the eye before collapsing, he told Larsen.

Using a stolen government weapon supplied by Derby-Lewis, he had not intended to kill Hani on that particular morning, he confessed.

Even though Hani’s bodyguards had been given the weekend off, Waluś said he had been “scoping” the area when he spotted the leader in his driveway clutching his newspapers and “took the opportunity”.

He did not use a “backyard” silencer that had been supplied as it would have prevented him from firing more than one shot.

While he had “no regrets” about killing Hani in what he regarded as a “war”, he did regret “taking a father and a husband away. And that I have told his daughter Lindiwe”.

The assassination of Hani had seismic effects, almost tipping the country into a race war. The security forces had hoped to stage a coup of sorts, halt negotiations and “restore order”.

In the end, it was the freshly released Nelson Mandela, not yet president, who calmed the storm.

Waluś was first released on parole in 2022 after almost three decades behind bars, a death sentence having been commuted to life after the abolition of the death penalty in democratic South Africa.

His two-year parole confined him to South Africa and in 2024 he was sent to his homeland, at the cost of the Polish government.

‘I did it for ideology’

While Waluś said had had been offered money for killing Hani, he had not accepted this. He did the work for no fee because he believed in his mission and because he did not want to be under an obligation to anyone.

He also did not want there to be any paper trace “that can be used against you”.

“It was purely political. It was not for personal gain. I did not have any personal animosities towards the victim,” he told Larsen.

On meeting Hani’s daughter Lindiwe, Waluś said he had “only good words for that young woman”.

She had been the only person in the Hani family who had visited him in prison and who had listened to him without accusing him of lying.

“She was ready to listen I told her everything I know.”

He was giving the interview, he told Larsen in parting, for South Africans to find some closure about the killing of Chris Hani.

Home, he replied after thinking for some time when Larsen asked the question, was still South Africa. He knows he will never be able to set foot here again.

“I miss the weather”. DM