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| Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan jailed for 23 years | Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan jailed for 23 years |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| A Maoist cult leader who committed a string of sex assaults and kept his daughter captive in London for three decades has been jailed for 23 years. | |
| Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, of Enfield, called himself Comrade Bala and brainwashed his cult into thinking he had god-like powers, Southwark Crown Court heard. | |
| Over 30 years he also raped two of his followers. | Over 30 years he also raped two of his followers. |
| His conviction included child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault. | His conviction included child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault. |
| 'Caged bird' | |
| The court heard he 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. | |
| His daughter Katy Morgan-Davies, 33, who has waived her right to anonymity, said the situation was "horrible, so dehumanising and degrading". | |
| "I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings," she said. | |
| Branding him a "narcissist and a psychopath", she 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. | |
| And she said her father was using the sect as a "pilot unit" to learn how to control people before taking over the world. | |
| She said: "I used to think 'God, if the whole world is going to be like this, what way out is there? How am I going to live? I cannot live in this. | |
| "So I used to think that the best way would be to die." | |
| Told she was a "waif", it was only when she was a teenager that she learned a follower of Balakrishnan, Sian Davies, then known as Comrade Sian, was her mother. | |
| Ms Davies fell from a window at the cult's base on Christmas Eve in 1996 and died several months later in hospital | |
| Ms Morgan-Davies said that night she heard screaming and shouting and saw her mother lying in a pool of blood below the bathroom window pleading with Balakrishnan to "kill me". | |
| She said in the subsequent years she would dream of her mother and wake up crying. | |
| Ms Morgan-Davies managed to escape the cult in 2013 after memorising the number for an anti-slavery charity she saw on the news. | |
| She has since moved to Leeds and started an education and said "I've been a non-person all my life and now is my chance to be myself." | |
| During sentencing the judge recommended that £500 be given to the charity which helped Balakrishnan's daughter escape. |