POLICE in Britain are to reopen an investigation into the death of a woman who fell out of a window in 1997 with revelations it was where the alleged slave couple had been living.
Welsh-born Sian Davies, 44, fell from the second floor of the three-storey property on Herne Hill in South London which was being rented by Maoist cult leaders Aravindan and Chanda Balakrishnan.
The death from the bathroom window was not considered suspicious at the time, but police have confirmed they are now again looking at archive material and the circumstances of the death.
Ms Davies was in hospital for seven months after the fall before dying of her internal injuries.
"She was a vivacious outgoing girl," her cousin Eleri Morgan said. "She went to London to study economics then she just disappeared. She had written home and said she was looking after mothers of the world, a group I was led to believe was run by Maoists."
She said the only time she visited family was in the company of two minders.
"It was always Comrade Bala this and Comrqde Bala that, her letters were as if someone was saying 'this is what you have to write'."
Ms Morgan said despite the coroner recording an open finding she always her doubts. She said she met Balakrishnan at the inquest and was expecting a charismatic leader and instead found a toothless old man.
A police spokesman confirmed the reopening.
"We are attempting to access archived paper records from the inquest," a Scotland Yard spokesman said.
It is not known whether Ms Davies was a visitor or lived at the home in Herne Hill, London with Mr Balakrishnan and his wife.
The Sun has reported Ms Davies is believed to have been the mother of the lifelong slave identified as Rosie, who was recently released along with two other women apparently kept by the Balakrishnans at another home in Lambeth.
Until now it had been reported that Rosie's parents died in a fire.
VICTIM'S FAMILY COMES FORWARD
In another new development, a Malaysian family claims one of the women allegedly held as a slave for 30 years is a relation.
Kamar Mautum told Telegraph UK that said she believed her 69-year-old sister, Aishah, was one of the women held captive and wants to take her back to their home just outside Kaula Lumpar. She studied at an elite Malaysian school before winning a Commonwealth scholarship to study surveying in London.
Aishah Mautum moved to Britain in 1968 with her fiancé Omar Munir and they became part of the Malaysian and Singaporean Students Forum, an extreme Maoist group led by Balakrishnan and Chanda Pattni, who eventually cut off Mr Munir.
Kamar Mautum told The Telegraph: "I have felt so choked without her for years and years. She was so talented, she was the apple of my mother's eye. She asked for her on her death bed."
She added: "When my mother died she [Aishah] did not want to talk to us and I could not do very much."
"This has been a dark age for her and for all of us. I will do anything to bring her home. I want to see her before either of us dies."
A former member of Balakrishnan's Maoist sect told The Telegraph: "What happened is that over 25 to 30 years all of the things that were supposed to happen, didn't happen.
"The world did not have a global revolution. His vision collapsed but he still tried to keep a grip on a small number of people.
"Aishah had cut herself off from everybody, her relationship, her family and lived in the collective. She remained with them, was financially dependent on them, had no friends, she became more and more reliant on them."
"If your self-confidence is being chipped away all the time, self-esteem chipped away, you feel intellectually inferior … and you are dependent on group living, you are as good as being in prison."
CULT RUMOURS KNOWN: NEIGHBOURS
Members of "The Collective" were questioned at the original inquest into Ms Davies' death. Aishah Wahab, one of the group's members, said that she had followed Ms Davies upstairs that day and had heard the window opening and a scream.
Ms Wahab told the inquest that the window was opened for ventilation.
Corner Selena Lynch called the death a "mystery".
"I still find it difficult to know how she fell out of the window, indeed what she was doing opening the window at that cold time of year," she said.
A neighbour of the property in Herne Hill, London, said there were rumours of a strange sect living in the house during the Balakrishnans' seven-year tenancy in the 90s.
"I remember was there was local gossip that a woman had fallen out of a window and that she had died," Kate Roncoroni, 43, told The Mirror.
"People were talking about it having something to do with a cult.
"It was a very different area in those days. There were squatters and bonfires in the streets. You wouldn't think much about groups living together then."
A Scotland Yard police spokesman told The Mirror: "We are aware of this and we are attempting to access archived paper records from the inquest."
A total of 13 addresses linked to the suspects, who set up the Communist cult in the 70s, are being investigated.
Balakrishnan, 73, and Chanda, 67, were arrested last week on suspicion of keeping three women in domestic servitude for three decades, refusing them permission to leave and administering physical beatings.
Police suspect the two of the women may have begun living with the couple shortly after the political cult was closed down. They believe they never left because they had been brainwashed and were genuinely terrified, while Rosie was borne into captivity.
This fear was borne out in some of the 500 letters in seven years the 30-year-old wrote to a neighbour in Brixton in which she described feeling like "a fly trapped in a spider's web".
The third victim is believed to be a 57-year-old Irish woman believed to be from County Armagh. All three were "rescued" with the help of police and a small charity last month.
“Unspeakable torment” ... the 30-year-old slave Rosie held as a slave in a house in London. Source: Supplied
Balakrishnan and Chanda were well known to police and security authorities in the mid 1970s after setting up an extreme left wing squat in a bookshop called the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre in Brixton. They had come to Britain in the 1960s.
Balakrishnan was a former member of the national executive committee of the Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist) but was suspended from the party in 1974 for pursuing "conspiratorial and splittist activities".
The pair was arrested in 1978 when police stormed the bookshop to shut it down and both later served a prison sentence for assaulting an officer during the raid. Between them they were jailed eight times during the 1970s but then laid low.
"They were a tiny, very tight-knit group clearly under the spell of their leader 'Comrade' Balakrishnan," said Professor Steve Rayner, an Oxford University academic who researched the extremist Maoist group at the time.
Professor Rayner said most of the members were foreign-born who had difficulty adjusting to the UK way of life.
Rosie penned hundreds of desperate letters and poems from captivity to a neighbour, describing how she suffered "unspeakable torment" at the hands of a couple who adopted her when she was a baby after her parents died in a fire.
Starved of love, the victim sent letters and 220 poems to Marius Feneck, a neighbour she fixated on, telling him how she was locked up by 'evil and racist' monsters.
Hundreds of letters and poems of torment ... One of Rosie’s letters. Source: Supplied
The unit at Peckford Place, Lambeth, where the family group lived has been boarded up. Balakrishnan and Chanda have been given police bail until January as investigations continue.
The house of “slaves” ... A man walks near a road sign in Lambeth in London where three women were allegedly been held in a house for 30 years as slaves. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
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