Former cult leader In London slavery case dies in prison
A Maoist cult leader who committed a string of sex assaults and kept his daughter and a number of others, including Malaysian Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab, captive for three decades has died in prison.
According to a report by the BBC, Aravindan Balakrishnan (above), better known as Comrade Bala, died in Dartmoor Prison on Friday.
A Maoist cult leader who committed a string of sex assaults and kept his daughter and a number of others, including Malaysian Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab, captive for three decades has died in prison.
According to a report by the BBC, Aravindan Balakrishnan (above), better known as Comrade Bala, died in Dartmoor Prison on Friday.
Balakrishnan, who was born in India but raised in Singapore, brainwashed his cult into thinking he had godlike powers.
He was jailed for 23 years in 2016 after being convicted of offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault.
During his trial at Southwark Crown Court, jurors heard that over 30 years, he also raped two of his followers.
His daughter Katy Morgan-Davies said her ordeal had been "horrible, dehumanising and degrading".
The court heard Balakrishnan established the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the 1970s in south London and convinced his followers into thinking he could read their minds.
He warned them a supernatural force called Jackie would cause natural disasters if he was ever disobeyed.
Branding him a "narcissist and a psychopath", his daughter said: "The people he looked up to were people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein - you couldn't criticise them either in the house.
"They were his gods and his heroes. These were the sort of people he wanted to emulate."
During the trial, she told the court she was beaten and banned from singing nursery rhymes, going to school or making friends.
Malaysian-born Siti Aishah was 24-years-old when she came to the United Kingdom in 1967 to study quantity surveying with a Commonwealth scholarship but found herself entangled with the group and eventually cut herself off from her family.
In 2017, the case was documented in an hour-long documentary titled "The Cult Next Door".
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