I had a closer look at the problem, and I think that the above situation is actually handled wrong by jBPM 4.4. I made a patch for head revision 6902 of the jbpm 4 repository (to whom it may concern, see attached). It disables the kill mechanism by default but provides also an attribute to enable the kill machnism. However, there may be better solutions, e.g. to avoid this kind of kill mechanisms at all which should be discussed.