On 6 May 2004, the BBC reported thus:

"A British diplomat paid for his gay African lover to travel to England and claim asylum, a court has heard.

High Commission attaché Christopher Henderson met Feston Konzani while he was on government business in Malawi. The revelation came during the trial of Mr. Konzani, 28, who denies causing grievous bodily harm to four women by inflicting them with the HIV virus...

Mr Konzani is accused of infecting the four women by having unprotected sex with them.

Mr Henderson... admitted that under Malawi law homosexuality was illegal. The court was told that Mr. Henderson, who worked as a political attaché for the High Commission in Malawi, had unprotected sex with Mr. Konzani after giving him a job as a trainee houseboy at his official residence.

After returning to England, the government official kept in touch with Mr. Konzani through a mutual friend in Malawi to the point where he sent money to cover his airfare to England. The court was told the diplomat also faxed immigration advice, which included the line:

'Destroy this once you have read it'....

The women range in age from 15 to 37 and include... three English women. He has pleaded not guilty...

Mr Konzani was diagnosed with the condition after one girlfriend who became pregnant by him, discovered she had it and made him have the tests".

At the Positive Nation website, which describes itself as "the UK's HIV and sexual health magazine," Positive Nation and the teenage girl, whom Konzani infected with HIV, tell her story thus:

"Dawn was a 15-year-old virgin when she met Feston Konzani - a meeting that was to change her life forever...

Dawn was brought up on the Thorntree estate in Middlesbrough, built in the post-war period to house working class families from the demolished town centre Victorian terraces. Today it is a sprawling sink estate characterised by acute poverty and deprivation.

Three years ago... Feston Konzani came to this run down area under the system that disperses asylum seekers across the UK.

Dawn, 15, had just left secondary school and was training to be a hairdresser, earning extra money helping out at her uncle’s pub in Eston on the hilly fringes of town. The pretty but impulsive teenager first met the flamboyant African near her mother’s house in June 2001.

'Me and my friends were just walking down the street and he asked us if we wanted to go to a party, so we said yes,' Dawn explains.

It proved to be a fateful meeting that would have a devastating impact on both their lives...

'We didn’t know him but he was very friendly. So we thought: new person why not? He seemed really nice.

After about a week I met him again on the street. We were just talking and he asked me to be his girlfriend...

I was just a 15-year-old with bad taste. I liked his braided hair in different shades and wonky at the front. I think it was his hair that got me.

After only two weeks of going out with him I said I’d move in with him. I don’t know why. I was so young and so stupid but my mum wasn’t so bothered because I was always up and leaving. I’d often disappear for a bit with friends. If I was arguing with my mum I used to just get up and leave so she thought nothing of it...

He was my first proper boyfriend. I was a virgin when I met him. He was about 25 and I was 15. We began to sleep together and he was nice to me at first, but then, after a few weeks, he started locking me in his house He didn’t want me to go out with my friends. He said he didn’t like them.

He was a lunatic. I wasn’t allowed to ring or see my mum. I didn’t know whether I was in love or infatuated, but at the time I did like him a lot.'
 
They never used condoms and Dawn never asked why, unaware of the risks of catching a sexually transmitted disease.

'At the time I didn’t know about such things. Every time the nurse came to school to talk about sex education I used to walk out. I used to go bright red with embarrassment. Mum told me about stuff but I didn’t know then that it could be dangerous.'

Dawn said she stopped talking to him and just watched TV all day...

'I was just like a sex slave.'
 
Konzani never mentioned HIV.

'Even if he did, I probably wouldn’t have known what it was,' adds Dawn.

'By August 2001 I was getting really fed up with him and thought ‘Right, I’m going’. So I packed up my stuff and climbed out the window and went back to mum’s.'

Dawn then started dating Jamie, a drug user. She went to her doctor’s because she thought she might be pregnant. He took urine and blood samples but did not tell her she was being tested for HIV as well as pregnancy.

'I waited about three or four months and then my doctor came round to my house and told me I had to go to hospital... I just wanted to die. I thought there was no point in living. He said: ‘I’ve made an appointment for you at the hospital and they’re going to look after you because you’re HIV positive. I know it’s going to be a shock but you’re going to have to go...

The doctors told me it was because I’d had unprotected sex. I was pretty scared actually. I thought I was going to die. I thought I caught it from the lad who was the drug user. I didn’t have a clue. But he went for a test and it came back negative. So it made me think I must have caught it off Konzani.'

Her doctor went to the police after getting Dawn’s consent.

'The police saw me at the hospital because I didn’t want them round my mum’s. They said he’d done it to other girls as well. They took a statement, some more blood and interviewed me.'

Dawn told them she had consented to sex with Konzani but that he had never brought up the issue of HIV. And she also told them the sex had been unprotected...

When the police told me I would have to go to court I panicked. It was very scary at the Crown Court. I started crying when I was questioned by the lawyers. His barrister was pretty horrible to me. Basically he called me a slapper and said I was sleeping around and Feston wasn’t the first man I’d slept with. But I told then that I was a virgin when I met him.

The HIV clinic put me onto Teesside Positive Action and they’ve been really helpful. If I’ve got a problem or don’t understand something I go and see them and they’ll explain. I’ve also met other people who are also HIV positive. After the court case I met one of the other girls infected by Konzani and she’s a lovely lass...

I started self-harming and cutting my arms. I was taking my anger out on myself instead of on him. I felt much better after I’d spoken to the police because that was me getting him back for what he’d done to me.

I feel happy he’s been sent to prison. At least I know he’s not going to go out and give some other girl HIV. He could have done it to my little sister or to anyone. I think he got what he deserved'...

After the court case, she moved to Bradford where she married a Pakistani lad and worked in a shop. She told him about what had happened. He wanted children and she didn’t want to risk it, so the marriage ended but they are still friends. Like most teenagers Dawn still likes to go out especially to gay clubs which she thinks are a 'right laugh'."

The way the dim live today, hey?

You could not make it up.


And this is how a chap called Bruce Wainwright excuses Konzani at Positive Nation's website.

"The harm Feston Konzani caused his lovers was in every way grievous, but this does not make him a criminal, argues Bruce...

He's black, an asylum seeker and has a gay, white lover in the diplomatic service. He's HIV positive and has infected four women. If the BNP had written the story, the details would hardly have been more baroque.

The tabloids, of course, love it: 'HIV Monster caged for ten years,' stormed The Mirror.

The man in question is, 28-year-old Feston Konzani, convicted at Teesside crown court in May of grievous bodily harm, although his barrister, Tim Roberts QC, argued that under the law, he had not actually done anything wrong. Roberts argued that to have unprotected sex with a woman without disclosing a sexual disease is not yet illegal.

But the jury took just three hours to disagree, and convicted Konzani on three charges.

Judge Peter Fox sentenced Konzani to a total of 10 years in prison, followed by deportation. That Konzani harmed his victims, and that this harm was in every way grievous, there can be little doubt. Whether his conviction was sound in law will, however, be decided in any subsequent appeal...

The defence rested, in essence, on the same belief advanced by the Terrence Higgins Trust:

'You have no right to know, and I have no duty to tell.'
 
It is a clear and simple dictum which I have always been prepared to use myself. It, in effect, shares responsibility for transmission from the positive person to both people involved.

'You have no right to assume anything about me, and I have no responsibility to tell you what my medical condition might be.'
 
Everyone engaging in sexual activity has a responsibility for protecting themselves, and that responsibility cannot be shuffled off onto the person who is positive.