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		</div><p>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.</p>
<p>Arvindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, carried out a “brutal” campaign of violence and “sexual degradation” against the women in the UK over several decades.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>After fathering a daughter with one of his acolytes, he kept her a prisoner in their London home for three decades.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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, adding: “I believe justice has definitely been done. I am very happy with the result and at the end of the day he is still my dad.”</p>
<p>She fled in 2013 with the help of a charity. She was 30 years old.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Describing life inside the commune, she said: “I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings. Like a fly in a spider’s web. Just really helpless and powerless.”</p>
<p>Balakrishnan, of Enfield, north London, was found guilty of six counts of indecent assault and four counts of rape.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Grey-haired Balakrishnan looked ahead stone faced as he listened through a hearing loop as the guilty verdicts were read out.</p>
<p>But Josephine Herivel, one of his former followers, shouted across the courtroom floor: “You are sending an innocent man to prison. Shame on you.”</p>
<p>Judge Deborah Taylor said Balakrishnan faces a “substantial custodial sentence”.</p>
<p>The pensioner denied the abuse, and insisted the women vied for his affection and he treated his daughter with compassion.<br />
But the court heard he used his charisma and radical politics to prey on women.</p>
<p>He came to Britain from Singapore in 1963 and enrolled at the London School of Economics – well known during the 1960s for its radical student movement.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He gained a number of followers, but as time went by his influence “waned” and the group dwindled to just six women.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>His followers were only allowed to read left-wing texts, spied on each other, and were sexually assaulted and beaten by Balakrishnan.</p>
<p>He convinced them he could control people’s minds and would “scrub them clean of the bourgeois culture and lifestyle”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The aftermath of the horrifying incident was witnessed by the 13 year-old girl, who was unaware at the time that “Comrade Sian” was her mother.</p>
<p>Giving harrowing evidence at the trial, his daughter told how she was bullied and beaten over 30 years for the most minor things, such as singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.</p>
<p>She found comfort and courage in the stories of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings – the only books she was allowed to read.</p>
<p>Police said Balakrishnan’s victims endured years of “torment and torture”.</p>
<p>Detective Sergeant Paul Wiggett, the investigating officer, said it was a “completely unique” case and 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”.</p>
<p>Balakrishnan was remanded in custody to be sentenced on 29 January 29.</p>
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