JOHANNESBURG — A extensively reviled apartheid-era murderer in South Africa was stabbed by a fellow inmate on Tuesday, simply days earlier than he was scheduled to be launched on parole, jail authorities mentioned.
The murderer, Janusz Walus, is commonly thought to be having introduced South Africa to the brink of civil battle through the tumultuous twilight period of apartheid within the Nineties for his killing of the charismatic anti-apartheid chief Chris Hani.
Mr. Walus survived the assault, which occurred in a Pretoria jail, and he was in secure situation afterward, South Africa’s correctional companies division mentioned.
Final Monday, South Africa’s chief justice, Raymond Zondo, ordered that Mr. Walus be launched on parole after serving 28 years in jail. The Constitutional Court docket choice drew expressions of shock from Mr. Hani’s household and set off a nationwide debate on the punishment of apartheid-era criminals.
Mr. Walus had approached South Africa’s highest courtroom after the justice ministry rejected his parole request in 2020. Chief Justice Zondo dominated that rejecting the attraction would set a unfavourable precedent for different prisoners serving life sentences. He discovered that beneath South Africa’s post-apartheid structure, all have been equal earlier than the legislation, and ordered that Mr. Walus be launched inside 10 days.
Within the days after the ruling, a memorial web site devoted to Mr. Hani was vandalized.
The judgment drew swift criticism, with the African Nationwide Congress and its allies releasing a press release saying the ruling “happy unrepentant apartheid perpetrators.”
“That is how South Africa has now turn into redivided,” the assertion mentioned. The A.N.C. and its allies additionally mentioned they have been planning a march to the jail on Wednesday to protest the choice.
By the late Nineteen Eighties, as violence roiled South Africa, Martin Thembisile Hani — popularly often known as Chris — had turn into one of the vital highly effective figures within the anti-apartheid wrestle. The chief of the South African Communist Social gathering and the guerrilla chief of the African Nationwide Congress’s armed wing, Mr. Hani’s name for intensified assaults on South Africa’s white inhabitants, particularly the safety police, resonated with tens of millions of offended younger South Africans pushed to take up arms to oppose the brutality of the apartheid authorities.
After Nelson Mandela, he was thought to be essentially the most charismatic chief of the time, and regarded his potential successor to steer the celebration and the nation.
His assassination in 1993, throughout tense negotiation with the apartheid authorities, introduced the nation to the brink of civil battle. As anger gave solution to violence in Black townships, Mr. Mandela addressed the nation, interesting for calm. He additionally pressed the federal government of F. W. de Klerk to set a date for the nation’s first democratic election in April 1994, averting additional unrest.
Within the years since his loss of life, Mr. Hani has turn into one thing of a martyr, along with his disciplined management and views on financial redistribution held up by South Africans annoyed by the cussed inequality and corruption which have sullied the status of the governing A.N.C.
Mr. Walus, alongside along with his co-conspirator, Clive Derby-Lewis, was sentenced to loss of life in 1993. He was additionally denied amnesty by South Africa’s Reality and Reconciliation Fee. His loss of life sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2000, after South Africa abolished the loss of life penalty.
Mr. Walus, a Polish nationwide, should stay in South Africa whereas out on parole, South Africa’s Dwelling Affairs Ministry mentioned.
Mr. Derby-Lewis was granted medical parole in 2015 and died simply over a 12 months later.