I did a bit more research, and it looks like it's not a bug or limitation of the parser. Your XML document is bad. According to Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition),

In the absence of information provided by an external transport protocol (e.g. HTTP or MIME), it is a fatal error for an entity which begins with neither a Byte Order Mark nor an encoding declaration to use an encoding other than UTF-8.

Make sure to use something like 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

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In reply to Re^2: XML::Simple and encoding by ikegami
in thread XML::Simple and encoding by Girzi

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