Simon Mol was not a political refugee

That’s the latest lurid expose in the newspapers and television today.

The newspaper Rzeczpospolita and the sensationalist, tabloid TVN program Uwaga claim that Simon Moll – who has given seven women HIV in Poland and is currently in prison waiting to be charged for knowingly spreading the virus – was not politically persecuted in either his home country of Cameroon or in Ghana, where he worked for a while in the early 1990s as a journalist.

The Uwaga program sent a team of journalists to the (very poor) village in Cameroon where he grew up to ‘look for his roots’. After showing his photo to the locals they came upon his brother who took them home to see Moll’s father and mother.

None of the family seemed to know where he was and had not had contact with him for years. When his mother heard what had happened to him recently she burst out crying.

Cue camera zoom in to tight, lingering close up of her tears.

But none of the family or his friends had heard about his ‘political persecution’.

Next the journalists went to Ghana where they made straight for the writers PEN club, of which Moll was once a member.

The PEN club is no more but they found some writers and journalists who knew Simon. They too had never heard of any persecution. In fact, one man they talked to had been to prison nine times for political activities.

The man said that Simon went to Poland as an economic refugee – he just wanted to escape the poverty of Africa – and not a political refugee.

The implication, I think, is that Moll had made the whole persecution story up and in fact 'stole' the life story of his fellow journalist.

The is another sad chapter in a story that you just couldn’t make up.

Or could you?

The saddest part of the TV program was when Simon’s mother, shocked from hearing that her son had HIV, and the Polish police had arrested him for spreading it, sobbed: “I am sick, too [with AIDS?], and I was hoping he would come home to bury me.”