To those who crossed his path in the Calais Jungle, he cut a sympathetic figure as a young Syrian refugee hoping to cross the Channel to start a new life free from fear and persecution.

With his easy charm and near-perfect English, Mohamed Bajjar bridged the yawning gap between the refugees and the British volunteers trying to help them.

Before long, the 27-year-old had become a leading light within one charity, Care4Calais, and a near-constant presence at the side of its married founder, Clare Moseley.

Calm before the storm: Clare Moseley and her husband Ben are pictured left. On the right is Mohamed Bajjar at his 2014 wedding to Brit Carol Hutchings

Cosy: Clare and Bajjar were an well-known item within the Calais jungle camp for the best part of her year, despite her own charity forbidding it

Their relationship, it was reported this week, became romantic and he and 46-year-old former accountant Mrs Moseley embarked on a year-long affair while he worked as her translator and bodyguard.

The liaison, which is said to have ended acrimoniously this month with Mrs Moseley accusing Bajjar — known as ‘Kimo’ — of trying to con her out of thousands of pounds, has embroiled the charity in a highly damaging scandal, not least because of its strict ‘no sex with refugees’ policy.

But even that egregious episode appears to be merely the tip of the iceberg.

For the Mail can reveal that not only is Bajjar not a Syrian refugee, but he was married to another British woman at the time of his affair with Mrs Moseley.

Actually a Tunisian market-stall trader, Bajjar embarked on an epic journey from his homeland to France’s northern coast — taking in detours to Italy, where he visited his sister, Germany, where he claimed asylum-seeker’s allowance, and Poland, where he worked in a factory.

His odyssey sheds a disturbing light on the ease with which economic migrants wanting to reach the UK can pose as refugees to cross borders.

Bajjar’s long-suffering British wife Carol Hutchings, who bears a startling resemblance to Clare Moseley, told me this week that she warned both Care4Calais and Mrs Moseley more than a year ago that her cheating husband was tricking them.

Coming to Britain: Divorced Tunisian migrant Mohamed Bajjar, 27, pictured, allegedly conducted a year-long affair with Clare Moseley while he was working as a translator at the Care4Calais charity Mrs Moseley founded

‘I was ignored,’ she says. ‘I messaged Clare Moseley online and I could see she’d read my message but I got no reply. Volunteers I contacted on Facebook blocked me. No one wanted to know.’

But in Calais, where volunteers are still working to help those left behind since the Jungle was bulldozed last October, Mrs Moseley has provoked outrage.

‘Sex between a refugee and a volunteer is not OK no matter how old they are,’ says one woman who used to work with Mrs Moseley. ‘The refugees have been to hell and back and are reliant on volunteers for food and warmth.

‘To sleep with someone 19 years her junior in that situation utterly disgusts me.’

But of course, Bajjar was no real refugee. His middle-class family owns a souk in Sousse, the Tunisian resort near where a terrorist gunman shot dead 30 British tourists in 2015. His parents are currently building a large multi-storey property in the city.

According to his wife Carol, a 54-year-old mother of two from Manchester: ‘He’s very ambitious and is happy to use women to get what he wants. Foolishly, I only realised that after I married him.’

Carol first met Bajjar in a nightclub in Sousse while she was on holiday in 2009. ‘I wasn’t looking for a relationship,’ she says, ‘but he was charming. I thought he was in love with me.

Romance: Mrs Moseley, 46, pictured, was vocal in her belief that volunteers should not have sex with migrants - despite having a romance with Mr Bajjar, it has been claimed

‘He lied about his age and said he was ten years older than he was. Looking back, it was all a con — but I was taken in.’

Carol and Bajjar stayed in touch via Skype and phone calls and he proposed to her six months later. She visited him twice a year, met his mother and twin sister, and they married in March 2014 in a ceremony in French, English and Arabic at his family home.

Carol, who returned to Manchester soon afterwards, considered moving to Tunisia but after the wedding, she says, Bajjar became more demanding and frequently asked her for money. ‘He said it was for a visa to come over,’ she says.

‘At the beginning I’d have moved heaven and earth to get him here, but I told him he needed to sort it out himself. I wasn’t sure any more that I even wanted him to come to England.’

Bajjar left Tunisia in September 2014. According to Carol, his parents gave him 3,000 euros (about £2,600) to travel in a fishing boat from Tunis to Palermo in Sicily, where he stayed with his sister for four months.

‘He phoned me out of the blue and said: “I got out of Tunisia and I did it without you.” ’

When he next called in January 2015, he was in Germany.

Relationship: Calais charity chief Mrs Moseley, pictured with pop star will.i.am, is said to have had a year-long relationship with the Tunisian migrant

‘He claimed asylum there by saying he was Syrian,’ she says, ‘But he had a job at a Coca-Cola factory in Poland and he flitted back to Germany each month so he could get his asylum-seeker’s allowance.’

Carol says Bajjar left Hamburg in Germany in July 2015, bound for Calais, after the German authorities found out he was Tunisian (everyone over 16 in Tunisia is fingerprinted, and they were able to match his prints).

He arrived in Calais just 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’.

Bajjar even spoke to a Channel 5 news team about his determination to get to the UK. ‘I’m not giving up,’ he said. ‘Every day I’m trying and keep trying, keep trying, until I get through.’

While Bajjar was hanging out with refugees trying to make their way through the Channel Tunnel, back in the UK, Clare Moseley was taking an increasing interest in the plight of Calais refugees.

The daughter of Merseyside folk singer Bob Buckle, she is a former accountant who once worked for large firms including Ernst & Young and Deloitte while regularly carrying out charity work.

She was a long-serving Prince’s Trust volunteer, providing free advice to start-up businesses on book-keeping and tax issues.

A friend claimed this week that Mrs Moseley’s ‘left-wing instincts’ were at odds with the corporate environment in which she worked, and that she longed to escape.

By Mrs Moseley’s own account, the moment she decided to swap her cosy life in the Merseyside suburb of Heswall for the Calais camp came when she was sitting in bed in the palatial £700,000 five-bedroom home she shares with her husband Ben, 38, a corporate tax specialist, reading an article about the refugee crisis.

‘Men, women and children were risking their lives to get to Western Europe and many were dying in the process,’ she later recalled, adding: ‘My husband came upstairs to find me crying. I felt helpless and angry.’

Fling: Mrs Moseley, pictured, ended the affair when she feared he was ripping her off after he demanded cash to send to his family, it was reported, after which he allegedly resorted to blackmail and threatened to send photos of them together to her husband

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 the French charity L’Auberge des Migrants but within weeks declared that she wanted to run her own charity.

The launch of Care4Calais in November 2015 was not popular with everyone. Some volunteers in Calais accused Mrs Moseley of wanting her own ‘ego vehicle’, rather than working alongside existing charities.

She was criticised for doubling the cost of aid reaching refugees by creating a need for two warehouses. And community representatives in the camp released a letter criticising ‘the leaders of Care4Calais’ for not trusting the refugees to distribute aid among themselves, as other charities did, but expecting them to queue to receive donated items.

At one stage they even asked the charity to ‘withdraw from the Jungle unless they are prepared to comply with the wishes of the community and code of conduct which has been worked out over many months between the volunteer organisations and the refugees’. Since the Jungle was demolished, the charity’s work has become more targeted.

Wed before: It has emerged that this is Tunisian Mr Bajjar's second romance with a British woman. He married a woman from Greater Manchester in Sousse, in 2015, in an alleged attempt to net a British passport

And while Mrs Moseley became a dynamic media figure — named as one of ‘six women who made 2015’ by the Guardian — 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 the drivers were forced to find other jobs.

Care4Calais later apologised for the comments.

She was again forced to make an apology last October for likening the treatment of asylum-seekers by French authorities to the plight of Jews under the Nazis. She said her ‘emotions were running wild’, adding: ‘I did not mean in any way to trivialise what happened with the Jews.’

Mrs Moseley was also vocal last September when it emerged that several women volunteers had embarked on relationships within the camp and a row broke out over whether those involved were ‘sexually exploiting’ the refugees.

The UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, called for charities in Calais to impose ‘zero tolerance’ policies on any exploitation to maintain their work’s ‘integrity’.

And, indeed, Care4Calais had already introduced its own ‘zero tolerance’ policy regarding relationships with refugees.

Mrs Moseley said such activity ‘will not be condoned on the basis of recognising the fundamental vulnerability of residents in refugee camps and the possibility of exploitative behaviour’.

Not surprisingly, given her relationship with Bajjar, she now faces accusations of hypocrisy. As one contributor to an online discussion put it: ‘This woman is an egotist who has brought bad press to the migrant crisis many times.’ It is not known when she began her relationship with Bajjar, who gave himself the more Syrian-sounding name ‘Kimo’.

Toyboy: Mr Bajjar, pictured left, was provided with a British mobile phone number, which he still uses, and drove a black Audi belonging to his middle-aged lover before their relationship went sour earlier this month, a friend said. He lives in a flat above a bar in Calais, pictured right

The photograph given to the Mail this week, of them sitting side by side in the camp (above left), was posted by Mrs Moseley in November 2015.

Carol Hutchings says she became aware that her husband was seeing someone else soon after he arrived in Calais. She saw photographs of him on Facebook, socialising with Care4Calais volunteers.

It became harder to reach him on the phone, she says, and he grew increasingly evasive. Once, when she called his phone, a woman she believes was Mrs Moseley answered.

‘It was obvious he wasn’t bothered about coming to England any more,’ she says. ‘Why would he, when he had such a good thing going in Calais? He always seemed to have money until last week, when he contacted me asking for help.’

According to former volunteers, the affair was common knowledge around the camp, with some refugees believing that Bajjar and Mrs Moseley were husband and wife. They were said to have moved into a shared Calais flat, while Mrs Moseley’s trips home to her husband became more sporadic.

One volunteer said: ‘It is deeply hypocritical that the woman who runs the charity had this relationship. Towards the end of it, everyone in the camp knew.’ Writing online, another of Mrs Moseley’s former co-workers wrote: ‘Clare is an egotist with a clear lack of professional boundaries. She makes all migrants and all volunteers look like sex-crazed lunatics.’

Camp relationship: When news of the alleged relationship broke, Mrs Moseley returned to her £700,000 family home on the Wirral, Merseyside, for talks with her account husband, Ben

Mrs Moseley’s ill-fated relationship with Bajjar is now believed to be over. She is said to have become concerned when he asked her for money to send to his family.

He was arrested on January 6 on suspicion of stealing her mobile phone but released without charge, and is now living above a clothes shop in Calais.

But despite everything, Mrs Moseley appears determined to carry on at the helm of Care4Calais.

She has refused to answer the Mail’s questions about her affair or reveal if Bajjar was paid by Care4Calais. A statement by the charity said: ‘Our priority remains to support and protect refugees.’

While three months have passed since the Jungle was razed, migrants still arrive in the area every day, setting up smaller camps.

Care4Calais is now advertising for a £40,000-a-year operations manager to work with Mrs Moseley.

With temperatures falling below zero in recent weeks, Mrs Moseley has appealed for blankets.

‘Let us stitch ourselves together, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, like a blanket created by the love of strangers who offer shelter to those who need it,’ she wrote on the Care4Calais website.

Some might argue of course that the chill in the Calais air is in danger of being forgotten amid the storm of controversy raging around her.