ONE of the women allegedly held as a domestic slave in London for 30 years could be a Malaysian student and left-wing activist who went missing in the city, according to reports in Malaysia.

Another former activist, Hishamuddin Rais, who was himself in exile in London in the 1970s, said he had been contacted by the brother of Aishah Abdul Wahab.

A Malaysian woman told the Daily Telegraph in Kuala Lumpur that she believed one of the three women freed by police last month was her 69-year-old sister, Aishah.

Wahab’s brother said he feared his sister had become embroiled in a London-based group that followed the teachings of Mao Zedong.

Rais, who also lived in Brixton, south London — the base for the Maoist political group-cum-sect led by Indian-born Aravindan Balakrishnan — told a Malaysian newspaper Wahab had been initially involved with a leftwing group in London called the New Malayan Youth.

Balakrishnan’s group, the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, formed in 1974, is known to have consisted mainly of overseas students in London. The apparent identification of Wahab is another element in the complex jigsaw that police are trying to complete. While officers have not named either of the two suspects, they are understood to be Balakrishnan, 73, known to fellow activists as Comrade Bala, and his 67-year-old wife, Chanda, originally from Tanzania.

Officers have said the women allegedly kept captive are a 69-year-old Malaysian — now believed to be Wahab — an Irish national, who is 57, and a British woman of 30.

The first two are believed to be former activists who remained with the couple after their political group broke up during the 1980s. The third, who police say is believed to have spent her whole life in a form of captivity, is reported to be a daughter of Balakrishnan and one of his followers, and has been named as Rosie.

Another woman believed to have formed part of the sect is now dead, something police are also investigating. Sian Davies, a former student at the London School of Economics (LSE) who lost touch with her family after becoming involved in far-left politics, became paralysed after falling from a bathroom window on Christmas Eve in 1996 and died in hospital in August the next year. The coroner described the death as “a mystery”.

The fall took place at a three-storey Victorian house in Herne Hill, near Brixton, where the group are believed to have lived for about seven years from 1997.

A neighbour said the household was known locally as “something to do with a cult”. Kate Roncoroni, 43, said: “I came here in 1996. It could have been within two years of moving in. All I remember was there was local gossip that this woman had fallen out of a window and that she had died.”

Davies’ cousin Eleri Morgan told British ITV news the woman’s family had been told about her fall only after she had died.

Morgan said Davies had written home talking of how she was looking after the “mothers of the world” but saying she was not allowed to see her cousin. Her letters spoke of “Comrade Bala”. Morgan described meeting Balakrishnan at the inquest into her cousin’s death: “I had such a shock because I imagined somebody charismatic and there was this toothless old man.”

It emerged on Monday that in 1976, two years after splitting from the tiny Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist) to form his own group, Balakrishnan and about 25 followers set up a bookshop and commune in Brixton devoted to Mao. The centre was closed after a police raid in 1978, in which Balakrishnan and his wife were jailed for assaulting police. Reports of the case say the couple and other defendants angered the judge by refusing to recognise the authority of the court.

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