Program exits unexpectedly without error

Question

I faced strange behaviour - WSSecSignature (part of wss4j lib) performs

  c14nMethod = signatureFactory.newCanonicalizationMethod(canonAlgo, c14nSpec); //last
  } catch (Exception ex) {
  log.error("", ex);
  throw new WSSecurityException(
  WSSecurityException.FAILED_SIGNATURE, "noXMLSig", null, ex
  );
 }

and exits without any exceptions/notifications. The line marked with "last" is the last executed (I see it with debug), program doesn't enter catch block nor performs the line after it, just exits. I don't own code of current signatureFactory implementation, just jars. Could someone provide thoughts on realistic scenarios why it can behave this way (the only thing I can think of - the class for some reason calls smth like system.exit() without even writing a message in log but I cannot imagine the reason to write such code).