Cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan dies in prison

A Maoist cult leader who committed a string of sex assaults and kept his daughter captive in London for three decades has died in prison.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 81, of Enfield, called himself Comrade Bala and brainwashed his cult into thinking he had godlike powers. He was jailed for 23 years in 2016.

Balakrishnan died in HMP Dartmoor on Friday, the Prison Service said.

It added that the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman had been informed.

Balakrishnan was 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, so dehumanising and degrading".

Ms Morgan-Davies who waived her right to anonymity, said: "I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings."

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.

She said her father used the sect as a "pilot unit" to learn how to control people before his aim of 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."