POLAND:A Polish author has been jailed for 25 years over a murder plot identical to that of his novel, which he always claimed was fantasy.
Polish prosecutors proved yesterday that Krystian Bala's 2003 book Amok was not just stranger than fiction - it was fact.
Seven years ago fishermen hauled an emaciated, bound corpse from the river Oder, but until now police never found the killer.
Yesterday Bala sat stony-faced in a packed Wroclaw courtroom as he was found guilty for the 2000 killing he once boasted was the "perfect crime".
"Mr Bala has two faces," said judge Lidia Hojenska. "One we met in the court, a calm and self-controlled man. But he tends to be very aggressive, especially after taking alcohol." Bala's violent alter-ego was the protagonist and narrator of Amok, describing in grisly detail the kidnap, torture, starvation and murder of a businessman.
For police inspector Jacek Wroblewski, the thriller threw up startling similarities to the 2000 case of Dariusz Janiszewski, who was abducted and tortured before being thrown, bound but alive, into the river Oder where he drowned.
Insp Wroblewski's suspicions were raised further by details mentioned in the book known only to police and, presumably, the perpetrator of the real crime.
He brought Bala in for questioning several times about claims his wife had been having an affair with the dead man - a claim the woman denies - and again after the book was published. The author claimed that what he knew of the case he had learned from press reports.
After a Polish crime programme broadcast a report on the still unsolved murder in 2003, Insp Wroblewski discovered that an internet user in South Korea had posted a message to its website, describing the killing as a "perfect crime".
Bala, a travel writer and photographer, was in the region at the time the remarks were posted.
An acquaintance told the court that Bala reacted badly at a party months after the killing in 2000. When he noticed a man flirting with his by then estranged wife, Bala said he had "already taken care of a man like him".
Psychological assessments described Bala as a narcissist of above-average intelligence, emotionally immature and revenge-prone, and incapable of foreseeing the implications of his actions.
"He was pathologically jealous of his estranged wife," said Judge Hojenska in her verdict.
"He could not allow his estranged wife, whom he treated as property, to have ties with another man."
In the end, it was not Bala's audacious book that trapped him but a simple slip. Four days after the killing, police discovered that he sold the victim's mobile phone using his own account on an internet auction site. That was insufficient evidence to prove he killed Janiszewski, but the rest of the circumstantial evidence was strong enough to secure a conviction of conspiracy to murder, which Bala is set to appeal.
It was an ending Bala did not foresee: in his book the perpetrator of the crime gets away with the murder.
