Passing a local variable to a del statement results in that variable being removed from the local namespace. When exiting a function all local variables are deleted, so it is unnecessary to explicitly delete variables in such cases.

Remove the del statement.

In the function below, the variable x is assigned a value that is used for a calculation, and is then explicitly deleted before the function exits. In this case, the delete statement can be removed without changing the behavior of the function.

Python: The 'del' statement.

Python/C API Reference Manual: Reference counts.