Cameroonian Asylee dies in Polish jail

The death has been announced of Simon Moleke Njie aka Simon Mol. The Cameroonian’s name hit the headlines in Poland over the last few years for deliberately infecting several Polish women with the lethal HIV virus. He reportedly died Saturday, 11 October at a Warsaw hospice.

Mol, 34, of Bakweri origin was placed under trial since July this year following his arrest last January. Public prosecutors said they received testimonies indicating that he intentionally infected over 40 women. Mol faced 10 years in prison. Yet, the Cameroonian declared he was ignorant of his status and refused to undergo treatment.
About a fortnight ago, reports indicated he was dying. In fact, he was temporarily transferred from pre-trial detention to hospital. Medics feared his health had so deteriorated he would hardly survive. They eventually failed to save the dying man who finally kicked the bucket at the weekend.
Investigators said shortly before his death, two more women levelled similar charges against him, eventually bringing the number of formally held accusations against him to 13. They said his victims were mostly young women whom he cornered by asking them to help him translate his articles, essays and poems from English to Polish.
He reportedly initially fled Cameroon in 1995 at age 22 after a purported spell of horrendous torture in jail. In one of his many writings posted on his website in July 2004, he claimed he was arrested upon return to Cameroon from South Africa by CENEER officials for carrying subversive documents. Included in the information he claimed to possess at the time, was proof that an unnamed Cameroonian minister had bought the sumptuous Queen Victoria Palace in Johannesburg at the towering cost of over 70 million US dollars.
That was the story he told Polish immigration officials as he sought refugee status. They eventually ruled that most of the story about his life was fabricated. Mol is not particularly known in the Cameroonian press to the point of going to research corruption in Johannesburg , a treat that not even the richest privately-run media in the country can afford.
Nonetheless he claimed his family and friends smuggled him from the country to a Pygmy village in Equatorial Guinea . From there, he wriggled into neighbouring Nigeria and then Ghana before finally ending in Poland over a decade ago. Mol, before his death, passed for the founder and secretary general of the Polish Association of Exiles, founder and editor-in-chief of Voice of Exile magazine, playwright, poet and exiled Cameroonian journalist. Polish police said the claims were bogus. But he claimed his trial was politically motivated.