Aravindan Balakrishnan

On 21 November 2013 Metropolitan Police from the Human Trafficking Unit arrested two suspects at a residential address in Lambeth, South London. A 73-year-old ethnic Indian Singaporean man, Aravindan Balakrishnan, and a 67-year-old Tanzanian woman, his wife, Chanda Pattni, had been investigated for slavery and domestic servitude. The case centred around the Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought commune which was led by Balakrishnan. In the early 1980s after a police raid, Balakrishnan decided to move the groups activities underground. Balakrishnan's control over his followers intensified and the commune became a prison to his followers. On 25 October 2013, three women were rescued from the commune. These were: a 69-year-old Malaysian woman (later revealed to be Aishah Wahab), a 57-year-old Irish woman (Josephine Herivel) and a 30-year-old British woman (Katy Morgan-Davies). Katy Morgan-Davies was born into the sect and hadn't experienced the outside world until her release.

Aravindan Balakrishnan (known to his followers as "Comrade Bala") was born in Kerala, India but migrated to Singapore, Malaya, where his father was a soldier, when he was 10. Balakrishnan was a student at Raffles Institution and later the University of Singapore, where although gaining a reputation as a "quiet chap", he became increasingly politically active and believed that he would have been imprisoned in Singapore had he openly admitted to being a communist. In 1977, while living in London, His Singaporean citizenship – which he gained in 1960 – was revoked due to his leadership of the Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, which the Ministry of Home Affairs accused of engaging in "activities which are prejudicial to the security" of Singapore, and denounced him as a radical "closely associated with Eurocommunists". The authorities claimed that Balakrishnan and others, many of them former Singaporean students he had associated with in London, were plotting to overthrow Singapore's leader, Lee Kuan Yew.