'Slavery' investigation: video of accused 'Comrade Bala' casts doubt on plight of women held as 'captives' Looking relaxed in a pink shirt, brown jacket and blue jeans, a bespectacled Mr Balakrishnan strolled into the inquest into Miss Davies's 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 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 Mr Balakrishnan into the hearing, pushing Miss Pattni in a wheelchair. In another clip, Miss Herivel, whose late father, John, was one of the leading code breakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, bluntly dismissed a television reporter's attempts to ask questions about Miss Davies's death. She told him: "You are part of the Fascist state. We don't want to speak to you. Mr Balakrishnan, an Indian from Singapore with Maoist sympathies, came to Britain in the Sixties 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 Miss Davies and Miss Herviel, 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 Mr 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." Miss 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.