Doubt cast on slavery story

Aravindan Balakrishnan (right) was filmed in 1997 as part of a television documentary. Photo / ITV

Fresh doubt was cast on the plight of three women held as "slaves" in south London, after new footage emerged of them defending their alleged captor and denouncing outsiders as part of the "Fascist state".

The footage, which features two of the women understood to have been freed last month, emerged as the first picture of their cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan was published.

The 73-year-old Maoist fanatic, known to his acolytes as "Comrade Bala", was filmed outside the inquest of Sian Davies, 44, a member of his collective who died in mysterious circumstances in 1997.

He was accompanied at the hearing by his wife, Chanda Pattni, 67, who was arrested with him last week on suspicion of holding the women against their will for more than three decades.

Also present were several other devotees of the radical left-wing sect, believed to include Malaysian Aishah Mautum, 69, and Northern Ireland-born Josephine Herivel, 57, who are thought to have been "freed" by police last month.

Looking relaxed in a pink shirt, brown jacket and blue jeans, bespectacled Balakrishnan strolled into the inquest into Davies' death at Southwark Coroner's Court in south London.

The 16-year-old video footage, shot by ITV News, appears to cast doubt on police claims that the women were allegedly held in conditions of "domestic servitude" and had no choice but to stay in the houses occupied by the collective.

The members of the sect freely followed Balakrishnan into the hearing, pushing Pattni in a wheelchair.

In another clip, Herivel bluntly dismissed a television reporter's attempts to ask questions about Davies' death.

She told him: "You are part of the Fascist state. We don't want to speak to you."

Balakrishnan, an Indian from Singapore with Maoist sympathies, came to Britain in the 1960s and joined the Communist Party.

However, after he was expelled, he and his wife, a Tanzanian Marxist, set up The Workers' Institute of Marxism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton, south London, in 1974.

His group was so extreme that other left-wing organisations made fun of its overblown revolutionary rhetoric, and he was mocked as "Chairman Ara".

However, the diminutive communist was said to have a certain charisma that drew a committed band of followers, many of them foreign students who were struggling to settle in the UK.

Based at a notorious bookshop and commune in Acre Lane, Brixton, the group published pamphlets calling for the downfall of capitalism.

In 1978 police raided the headquarters, arresting 14 members of the group.

The trial of six members accused of obstructing or assaulting the police during one of the raids descended into farce as the defendants, among them Davies and Herivel, refused to recognise the court and chanted slogans calling for the downfall of "Fascist states and their lackeys".

The bookshop was closed after this and the organisation is understood to have broken up, with Balakrishnan and his wife moving into a squat in Brixton with some of their followers.

The collective went underground and its numbers dwindled, only returning to the spotlight last week when the Metropolitan Police announced it had helped to free the "slaves".

Davies, a former student from Aberaron in Wales, had been a member of the sect for 24 years before she fell from a second-floor bathroom window on Christmas Eve 1996 and died in hospital more than seven months later.

Captive a daughter of code ace

An Irish woman allegedly held as a slave by a Maoist sect in south London is the daughter of one of Britain's Bletchley Park code breakers who helped ensure the Allied victory in World War II.

Josephine Herivel, 59, is the daughter of John Herivel, a mathematician who was a key figure in the team that cracked the German Enigma ciphers in 1940.

The first picture of Aravindan Balakrishnan, the man accused of keeping Herivel and two other women captive for 30 years, has also emerged.

Josephine Herivel.

Brought up with her two sisters, Mary and Susan, in Belfast, Herivel joined Balakrishnan's extremist collective in the 1970s after moving to London to study. She turned her back on her family and when her father died in 2011, obituaries made mention of only his two other daughters, who also live in London. They refused to comment on the development.

A friend of the family said they had tried to make contact with Herivel for years without success.

She was educated at Belfast Methodist College, and was a talented musician before moving to the mainland.

One of the core figures in Balakrishnan's circle, she was prosecuted in 1978 after police raided the group's south London bookshop and headquarters. Appearing in court with five fellow cult members, she displayed the extent to which she had fallen under the spell of the cult by refusing to recognise the court and denouncing the judge as a "Fascist lackey".

Herivel was also with the sect in 1997 when one of its members, Sian Davies, 44, died after falling from a window at a house in south London where Balakrishnan, his wife Chanda Pattni and supporters were living. At the inquest, the coroner criticised the women living there for not informing Davies' family of the accident, telling them instead that she was on holiday in India.

When journalists approached Herivel, she refused to discuss Davies' death or the arrangements inside the sect.