An issue has recently been raised concerning the setting of jBPM variables within the ESB 4.4 GA release.
Work had previously been done to allow for these variables to be set on the local scope but this has had the unintended side effect of making the local scope the default.
As a result, process forks which invoke ESB services may not function as previously intended.
The workaround for this is to explicitly specify the process-scope attribute on the mapping as follows
<mapping esb="BODY_CONTENT" bpm="theBody" process-scope="true"/>