LONDON: British police were yesterday for the first time interviewing three women allegedly held captive by a Maoist couple in London for 30 years, as fresh details of their secretive commune emerged.
An elderly Indian-born man and his Tanzanian wife — believed to have led a small Marxist splinter group in the 1970s — were arrested last week accused of keeping the women as “slaves” in a south London flat.
The women walked out last month saying they had been trapped there for decades, but police revealed that until yesterday they had only been in indirect contact with them because they were awaiting approval for full interviews from trauma experts.
Commander Steve Rodhouse of London’s Metropolitan Police said yesterday that officers had “not yet been able to formally interview the victims in this case so we don’t fully understand the nature of the allegations.
“We are moving to a point where we will be able to interview the victims and our plan is actually to do so today.”
He added that the victims were “in the care of specialists who have got great experience of dealing with people who have been subject to trauma. We’re working to that advice of those experts as to how best to handle those victims.”
A police spokesman told AFP the interviews had begun.
The women were “freed” on October 25 after one of them contacted a charity that usually deals with forced marriage and honour-based violence.
Their alleged captors, named by media as 73-year-old Aravindan Balakrishnan and his 67-year-old wife Chanda, have been freed on bail pending further investigations.
Police in Kuala Lumpur have identified the first woman as 69-year old Malaysian Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab, who came to Britain as a student in around 1968 before joining the radical left and turning her back on her family.
AFP
