HIV lover slept with at least 16 women; Cops get calls daily from frightened partners
Barbara Brown
609 words
10 September 2003
Copyright (c) 2003 The Hamilton Spectator.
Police are getting calls daily from women who fear they contracted the AIDS virus from a Hamilton man accused of practicing reckless sex. Detectives have now heard from 16 women, all of whom say they were unaware that Johnson Apangu Aziga, 47, was HIV positive when they consented to have unprotected sex.
The Bay Street North man is so far charged with endangering the lives of five of these women. But police say the case is rapidly becoming one of the larger criminal investigations in the country to involve a dangerous sexually transmitted disease.
Aziga, who works in Toronto as a research analyst with the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, was arrested Aug. 30 and held in custody on two counts each of aggravated sexual assault and aggravated assault.
Detective Troy Ashbaugh, of the Hamilton police special investigations unit, laid three more sets of charges Monday when Aziga appeared in court. He said the five complainants are between the ages of 29 and 48. The scope of the investigation includes not only Hamilton, but Toronto, Brantford and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
Ashbaugh said investigators were still interviewing women but so far the callers have turned out to be viable complainants.
Aziga was separated from his wife of 15 years at the time of his arrest. The couple is embroiled in a bitter custody dispute in family court. Aziga was diagnosed with HIV in 1996, three years before the marriage broke up. Ashbaugh said the medical confidentiality of the complainants prevents him from disclosing if any have tested positive for HIV. Charges of this nature have never been laid in Hamilton before and are still relatively rare in Canada, although London, Ont. has had two prominent cases in the last decade.
The most high-profile involved Charles Ssenyonga, who was accused of knowingly infecting three women with the AIDS virus. He was charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm and aggravated assault but died of AIDS in June 1993 before a verdict was handed down.
Ssenyonga may have infected as many as 20 people before his death. Edward Kelly, 29, who is HIV positive, was sentenced last month to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to exposing four women to the virus. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1998 that a person's failure to disclose to a sexual partner that he or she has AIDS or is HIV positive is a type of fraud that wipes out consent to sexual intercourse.
In the British Columbia case, Henry Cuerrier was warned by a nurse to wear condoms and to tell his partners he had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.
Within weeks, Cuerrier was having unprotected sex with a woman he had begun a relationship with and to whom he lied about his HIV-positive status.
A second sexual relationship lasted only a month before the woman found out he had HIV. Fortunately, Cuerrier did not pass the virus to either woman. He was acquitted in 1995 when a judge found that although Cuerrier had endangered the women's lives, a sexual assault had not occurred because both partners had consented to having sex. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the decision and so the Crown appealed again to the highest court in the land.
The Cuerrier case is now the benchmark by which police decide if charges are warranted in cases involving the deliberate transmission of HIV.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or 905-526-3494.