CLARE WITH HUSBAND How British charity boss who fell for a bogus Calais refugee is in fear of her life
She’s the married accountant so moved by the plight of The Jungle migrants she went over to help. Then, flouting her own rules, she had a fling with a ‘Syrian’ — who’s just tried to burn down her HQ
FROM the moment it was launched in 2015, on a wave of heartwarming largesse, the British charity Care4Calais became a magnet for those determined to ease the plight of refugees stranded in northern France.
Volunteers pitching up at the charity’s usually bustling warehouse near Sangatte in Calais this week, however, would have found the rented building — still stuffed to the rafters with bags of donations from kind-hearted Brits — virtually abandoned.
A sign is taped to the door, declaring operations ‘on the ground’ have been suspended.
The reason for halting their urgent humanitarian work? According to a statement on the charity’s website, it’s down to an ‘immediate security issue linked to a former volunteer’.
But, as the Mail can reveal, the true story behind the temporary closure of this controversial charity is far more disturbing than that statement implies. The volunteer referred to is Mohamed Bajjar, a 28-year-old Tunisian who, we revealed earlier this year, had a year-long affair with Care4Calais’s 46-year-old married founder, Clare Moseley — the same boss who implemented a strict ‘no sex with refugees’ policy among staff.
Their relationship ended acrimoniously at the end of 2016 amid claims that Bajjar, who has frequently posed as a Syrian refugee called ‘Kimo’ and was hired by the charity as a translator and bodyguard, had tried to con Mrs Moseley out of thousands of pounds.
It was Bajjar, the Mail can reveal, who on June 14 broke into the Care4Calais warehouse and who, in an apparent act of revenge directed at Mrs Moseley, poured petrol around the building, intent on setting it ablaze. His spite towards his ex-lover apparently ran deep. Before the failed attack, he texted a friend with a chilling message which was shown to the Mail: ‘I will just end up killing her and taking her life easy. I’m really ready to do it because I love her more than anything in the world.’
Fortunately, he was thwarted before he could ignite the petrol.
Morgan Schuppe, 29, whose family owns the warehouse, said: ‘Kimo turned up alone clearly in a very agitated state. He was carrying cans of petrol and spread it all over the warehouse.
‘He was shouting about how he was going to set the warehouse on fire. He said he wanted to “kill everyone” associated with the charity, and he was particularly angry with Clare.’
Once inside, Bajjar stole keys and around 30 mobile phones which belonged to the charity. ‘I was present with charity workers,’ said Mr Schuppe. ‘We were very scared. I tried to reason with him. His breath smelt of alcohol. He was clearly drunk and furious. He said he had a grievance with Clare.’
Mr Schuppe knew ‘Kimo’ from his time as a worker with the charity but said he had ‘changed completely’.
‘He was in a terrible state. I called the police and when they turned up they had to handcuff him. Kimo was taken away and placed in custody in Calais. The police are not able to tell me how he is being dealt with. We are living in fear of him returning. We have spent a lot of money changing locks and reinforcing doors.’
Morgan’s uncle, Michael Schuppe, who owns the warehouse, added: ‘We may have to review our relations with the charity.’
While Bajjar is believed to be in police custody in Calais, Mrs Moseley, whose husband, Ben, 39, is a corporate tax partner at Deloitte in Manchester, is travelling in the U.S.
The statement about the closure of Care4Calais referred to ‘our founder and CEO, who will be absent for some weeks due to health issues and other personal commitments’.
But this nasty incident has again embroiled Care4Calais in a highly damaging scandal, one in which the fall-out from Mrs Moseley’s private life threatens to overshadow her volunteers’ philanthropy.
It has also thrown a disturbing spotlight on border security at a time when the threat of terrorist attacks has never been so high.
In the six months since his affair with Mrs Moseley ended, Bajjar has seemingly travelled with shocking ease between the UK and France, by charming his way into the affections of yet another gullible volunteer.
The Mail has learned that Bajjar arrived in the UK in February this year, apparently smuggled into the country in the boot of a car driven by a British woman — another volunteer at Care4Calais.
Once here, he blithely posted a video of a street singer in Central London on his Facebook page, writing that he ‘had to give him £10 as I didn’t have any change’.
One of his friends responded: ‘Your [sic] in London now Kimo, wahoo’.
While staying with the 30-year-old woman in London, he also visited the Manchester home of his British wife — as if this saga wasn’t bizarre enough. He’d married Carol Hutchings in Tunisia in 2014, not long before his odyssey to Europe began.
MOTHER-OF-TWO Mrs Hutchings, 54, met Bajjar in a nightclub during a holiday in 2009. They kept in touch via Skype and married in Sousse in March 014.
But when she realised Bajjar was only after her money, she refused to help him get into the UK. And when she heard he was posing as a Syrian refugee, she was horrified.
He returned to Calais at the end of May, smuggled by the 30-year-old woman who’d helped him before.
According to one of our sources, the woman was arrested by French police and questioned on suspicion of terrorism for three days before being released without charge.
Bajjar attacked the Care4Calais warehouse three days later. Understandably, she says she no longer wants anything to do with Bajjar who, it is painfully obvious, is anything but a vulnerable refugee.
His middle-class family owns a souk in Sousse, the Tunisian town near the resort where a terrorist shot dead 30 British tourists in 2015. His parents are currently building a large multi-storey property in the city.
Bajjar left Tunisia in September 2014. According to Mrs Hutchings, his parents gave him ¤3,000 (about £2,600) to travel in a fishing boat from Tunis to Palermo, in Sicily, where he stayed with his sister for four months.
When he next called Mrs Hutchings, he was in Germany, where he claimed asylum-seeker’s allowance by posing as a Syrian while working at a Coca-Cola factory just over the border in Poland.
EVEnTUALLY, however, the Germany authorities found out that Bajjar was Tunisian — everyone over the age of 16 in Tunisia is fingerprinted and they were able to match his prints.
He left Hamburg in July 2015 before he could be deported, and headed to Calais, arriving days after David Cameron was condemned for describing migrants as ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain.’
It was there that he met Mrs Moseley, a high-flying accountant who has worked with firms including Ernst & Young and Deloitte while regularly carrying out charity work.
She was a long-serving Prince’s Trust volunteer, providing free startup advice to new businesses.
She has written in the past of the moment she decided to swap her cosy life in the Merseyside suburb of Heswall for the Calais camp. She said the moment came when she was sitting in bed in the £700,000 fivebedroom home she shares with her husband, Ben.
‘Men, women and children were risking their lives to get to Western Europe and many were dying in the process,’ she wrote, adding: ‘My husband came upstairs to find me crying. I felt helpless and angry.’
Within days she had filled her car with clothing and set off for the Calais camp where Bajjar had recently installed himself. She volunteered with French charity L’Auberge des Migrants, but within weeks declared she was setting up her own charity.
The launch of Care4Calais in november 2015 turned Mrs Moseley into an overnight media star.
High-profile visitors who have travelled to Calais to see the charity’s work at close hand have included the
likes of pop star will.i.am as well as Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott and former Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.
Mrs Moseley was named as one of ‘six women who made 2015’ by The Guardian, but controversy was never far away. In January 2016, after a series of attacks by migrants on lorry drivers, she sparked outrage by stating that ‘it was not the end of the world’ if drivers were forced out of their jobs and had to find other work. She later apologised for her remarks.
And in October 2016 she had to apologise again for likening the treatment of asylum-seekers by the French authorities to the plight of Jews under the Nazis.
She also caused ructions within the Calais Jungle itself where other volunteers accused Mrs Moseley of wanting an ‘ego vehicle’ and nicknamed her charity ‘Clare4Calais’.
But it was revelations about her relationship with Bajjar that provoked the most outrage, due to Care4Calais’s own ‘zero tolerance’ policy regarding relationships between volunteers and refugees.
According to former volunteers, the affair was common knowledge and the pair were said to have moved into a shared Calais flat. When the relationship ended, however, Bajjar complained that Mrs Moseley had simply used him.
According to Carol Hutchings: ‘When he came to see me in April, he said Clare had destroyed him. I warned several people at Care4Calais about him and I sent Clare a message, but no one listened.’
Mrs Hutchings, who is still married to Bajjar, is now in possession of his Tunisian birth certificate, driving licence and identity papers, which he left behind when he returned to France last month.
While he was in the UK, Bajjar contacted this newspaper, claiming to have proof that volunteers from Care4Calais were regularly smuggling migrants like him into the UK. He insisted it was he who set up Care4Calais and that the charity had been snatched away from him by Mrs Moseley.
‘It will be the biggest story in the world,’ he said. But aside from his presence in the UK, however, no proof was forthcoming.
He also sent copies of a message he claimed to have received from Mrs Moseley in March this year which read: ‘I suggest you leave the UK now because I am going to do everything I can to hurt you. You have no friends left and you know it. You f***ing looser [sic].’
WHIle the Mail cannot verify his claims, the email address from which the message was sent appears to belong to Mrs Moseley. She has declined to comment.
The Charity Commission, which regulates registered charities in england and Wales, monitored Care4Calais earlier this year as part of a sample of new charities.
It was ‘satisfied that the trustees were fulfilling their legal duties and responsibilities’, and found ‘no evidence to suggest the charity was involved in potential wrongdoing’.
Ironically, Care4Calais’s temporary suspension comes at a time when other charities still operating in Northern France warn that the refugee crisis is re-escalating.
Since the Calais Jungle was bulldozed last year, displacing around 10,000 migrants, a steady trickle has been returning. Volunteers say the number is expected to reach 1,000 by the end of summer.
In Calais this week, the Mail witnessed around 300 refugees lining up each night to receive food from charities still operating there, including l’Auberge des Migrants and Help Refugees.
loan, a 20-year-old volunteer with l’Auberge des Migrants, said: ‘The problem is that Care4Calais doesn’t do co-ordination with other groups. We didn’t do any action with them. I heard Care4Calais was closing operations, but I thought it was maybe for a couple of days. I didn’t realise how long for.’
Meanwhile, a British volunteer
with Help Refugees said ‘everyone knew about the relationship’ between “Kimo” and Mrs Moseley’.
Given the events of the past fortnight, it is perhaps not surprising that Care4Calais has decided to shut up shop for a while.
This week, a spokesman told the Mail: ‘While there was an attempted attack on our Calais premises, this did not lead to the cessation of operations as the person in question was taken into police custody and, we understand, then transferred to prison.
‘Clare has been working extremely hard for a long time. She remains committed to the charity, but has decided it is necessary to step back for the time being because she wants to spent more time with her family and because she has had to receive treatment for serious ongoing spinal health concerns.’
She added: ‘The trustees feel a temporary closure is prudent.’
This, of course, will offer scant comfort to volunteers arriving in Calais and heading to the charity’s warehouse with bags of donations or hopes of helping out.
Or to those back in the UK who have selflessly donated to the charity, unaware of the tumultuous saga going on within its ranks.