Hero’s welcome for far right assassin of ANC leader

NOTE: This article was published on 7 December 2024Janusz Walus, the racist fanatic who murdered Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man Chris Hani in 1993, has been deported from South Africa to his native Poland. He arrived at an airport in Warsaw this morning. The assassin, who spent almost 30 years in South African prisons after his…

NOTE: This article was published on 7 December 2024

Janusz Walus, the racist fanatic who murdered Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man Chris Hani in 1993, has been deported from South Africa to his native Poland. He arrived at an airport in Warsaw this morning.

The assassin, who spent almost 30 years in South African prisons after his death sentence was commuted, was greeted as a hero by several Polish extremists including one of the leaders of the Confederation party, whose international liaison officer recently spoke at the Homeland Party conference in the UK.

Robert Grajny, of the Polish Confederation Party, who addressed the Homeland Conference in the UK September. A Confederation Party leader was amongst those who greeted Walus at Warsaw Airport today

Walus left Poland in 1981 aged 28 and joined relatives in South Africa. During apartheid’s dying years of he became active in several extremist organisations, including the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB).

Walus conspired with Conservative Party MP Clive Derby-Lewis to assassinate Chris Hani, who was a leading figure in the ANC that was about to come to power under Nelson Mandela. As explained in a book earlier this year by Justice Malala, who was just beginning his career as a young journalist in 1993, Hani’s killers hoped that the murder would trigger civil war and prevent the end of apartheid.

Clive Derby-Lewis

Clive Derby-Lewis (who died in 2016 a year after being released from prison) was a friend of Gregory Lauder-Frost, who now organises the Traditional Britain Group. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Lauder-Frost worked with Derby-Lewis in far-right groups including Western Goals and the World Anti-Communist League.

Lauder-Frost had no connection with the Hani murder plot, as by that time he was already serving a prison sentence in the UK for fraud against his employer, Riverside Health Authority, from whom Lauder-Frost embezzled £100,000.

Deeply implicated

But one nazi with close British connections was deeply implicated in the assassination. Arthur Kemp, a journalist and informant for the South African security service, provided Derby-Lewis with a dossier containing details of Hani’s home. This intelligence was used by Derby-Lewis and Walus to plan the murder.

Kemp went on to be active with the British National Party and build links with American far right groups including American Renaissance and the National Alliance. In recent years he dropped out of public activity after being on the losing side in several factional disputes within the British far right. But he is still involved in online business enterprises, based until recently at his home in Wales, selling his own books and republishing new editions of out-of-copyright works by assorted nazis, racists and crackpots.


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Paul Nowak

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