A MAOIST cult leader who had a daughter with a follower from Tregaron who he then proceeded to hold captive for the next thirty years, has died in prison at the age of 81.

Aravindan Balakrishnan was said to have treated female followers at the London commune as his sex slaves by ‘bullying and brainwashing’ them into believing they would die if they did not worship him as a god.

He began an affair with former Aberystwyth University law student Sian Davies, the daughter of a Tregaron GP, who was said to have ‘disappeared’ after moving to London to study economics.

Later known as ‘Comrade Sian’, she was said to have fallen from a window at the cult’s base on Christmas Eve in 1996 and died several months later.

Balakrishnan, who died in HMP Dartmoor last Friday, was convicted in 2016 of offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault and jailed for 23 years.

Speaking in 2013, Annabel Aynsley, of Lampeter – a close friend of Ms Davies - said she had ‘no idea’ why her former schoolmate became involved with a Maoist group in London.

“At some point I did know she had joined some Maoist cult, because she disappeared basically from life around here,” she said.

Southwark Crown Court heard Balakrishnan established the Workers’ Institute of MarxismLeninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the 1970s in south London and convinced his followers into thinking he could read their minds.

It was only when his daughter Katy Morgan Davies was a teenager that she learned ‘Comrade Sian’ was her mother.

On the night of her mother’s fall, she said she heard screaming and shouting and saw her lying in a pool of blood below the bathroom window pleading with Balakrishnan to ‘kill me’.

She said in later years she would dream of her mother and wake up crying.

Ms Morgan-Davies – who waived her legal right to anonymity — managed to escape the cult in 2013 after memorising the number for an anti-slavery charity she saw on the news.