  We show that the aspherical manifolds produced via the relative strict
hyperbolization of polyhedra enjoy many group-theoretic and topological
properties of open finite volume negatively pinched manifolds, including
relative hyperbolicity, nonvanishing of simplicial volume, co-Hopf property,
finiteness of outer automorphism group, absence of splitting over elementary
subgroups, and acylindricity. In fact, some of these properties hold for any
compact aspherical manifold with incompressible aspherical boundary components,
provided the fundamental group is hyperbolic relative to fundamental groups of
boundary components. We also show that no manifold obtained via the relative
strict hyperbolization can be embedded into a compact Kaehler manifold of the
same dimension, except when the dimension is two.
