Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan found guilty of sex assaults
A Maoist cult leader faces the prospect of dying in jail after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women and imprisoning his own daughter in the commune for 30 years.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, carried out a "brutal" campaign of violence and "sexual degradation" against the women over several decades.
He brainwashed his followers into thinking he had God-like powers, and invented a supernatural force known as "Jackie" who, he said, could trigger natural disasters if his will was flouted.
Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan was found guilty of a string of charges
After fathering a daughter with one of his acolytes, he kept her a prisoner in their London home for three decades.
Beaten, banned from singing nursery rhymes, going to school or making friends, his daughter described herself as a "shadow woman" who was kept like a "caged bird".
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons but is being named Fran, today said she was "overwhelmed with relief" after his conviction for imprisoning her.
She added: "I believe justice has definitely been done."
She eventually fled in 2013 with the help of a charity. She was 30 years old.
She had escaped eight years earlier in 2005, but was sent home by police because it was a bank holiday, the trial at London's Southwark Crown Court heard.
Balakrishnan, of Enfield, north London, was found guilty of six counts of indecent assault and four counts of rape.
He was also convicted of two counts of ABH, cruelty to a child under 16, and false imprisonment. He was cleared of one count of ABH and one count of indecent assault.
Grey-haired Balakrishnan looked ahead stony-faced during the verdicts.
But Josephine Herivel, one of his former followers, shouted across the courtroom floor: "You are sending an innocent man to prison. Shame on you."
Judge Deborah Taylor said Balakrishnan faces a "substantial custodial sentence".
Balakrishnan came to Britain from Singapore in 1963 and enrolled at the London School of Economics.
By the 1970s he was at the helm of a communist group known as the Workers Institute and based in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London, which eventually dwindled in numbers to just six women.
Described in court as a "Jekyll and Hyde character", Balakrishnan turned his Communist commune into a "cult of Bala" where paranoia and fear became the order of the day.
His followers were only allowed to read left-wing texts, spied on each other, and were sexually assaulted and beaten by Balakrishnan.
He convinced them he could control people's minds and would "scrub them clean of the bourgeois culture and lifestyle".
One of the women, Sian Davies - who was the mother of his daughter - suffered fatal injuries when she fell from a window at the cult's home on Christmas Eve in 1996.
A coroner is now considering whether to order a fresh inquest into her death in light of Balakrishnan's conviction.
Giving harrowing evidence, his daughter told how she was bullied and beaten over 30 years for minor transgressions such as singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
She found courage in the stories of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings - the only books she was allowed to read.
Detective Sergeant Paul Wiggett, the investigating officer, said it was a "completely unique" case.
He said Comrade Bala's daughter was so terrorised by her father she "genuinely believed the day she left the house she was going to explode - that her life would come to an end".
Balakrishnan was remanded in custody to be sentenced on January 29.
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