Janusz Waluś shot prominent Black politician Chris Hani dead outside his home in Boksburg outside Johannesburg in 1993.

The assassination took place during the early stages of negotiations to end apartheid, the long-standing system of racial segregation which disenfranchised the Black majority in South Africa.

Waluś, who belonged to a neo-Nazi organization, spent nearly 30 years of his life sentence in jail but in 2022 he was released on parole, a decision which sparked widespread street protests.

South Africa’s home affairs minister said the deportation would take place on Friday and would be funded by the Polish authorities.

The now 71-year-old who was born in the mountain resort of Zakopane, migrated to South Africa in 1981 and was given citizenship, which was eventually revoked in 2017 due to his conviction for Hani’s murder.

Hani was a senior member of the African National Congress (ANC) and head of the South African Communist Party. The ANC-led government said on Friday that the country was “indebted” to the murdered leader.

“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,” it said in a statement, reported by Reuters.

In the 1990s, Waluś told a commission investigating the years of apartheid that he had committed the murder “to stop communists and radicals from gaining power in this country.”

During his years of incarceration, Waluś became a figure of admiration for some anti-communists and White nationalists in Poland.

Football supporters with far-right leanings hung banners bearing his image in a trend that started in the 2010s, according to a 2020 report by the BBC.

Dr Rafał Pankowski of the anti-racist organization Never Again Association told the broadcaster at the time that fans were “glorifying what he did and the ideology” behind it.