The leader of a Maoist “cult” who impregnated a follower from Tregaron proceeded to keep their daughter captive for the next 30 years, has died in prison.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 81, who set up the London commune, treated female followers as his sex slaves by “bullying and brainwashing” them into believing they would die if they did not worship him as a god.

Mr Balakrishnan began a sexual relationship with Sian Davies, the daughter of a Tregaron GP and one-time talented sportswoman whose family said had “disappeared” after moving to London to study economics.

Sian Davies had previously studied law at Aberystwyth University.

Later known as Comrade Sian, she fell from a window at the cult’s base on Christmas Eve in 1996 and died several months later in hospital.

Balakrishnan was convicted in 2016 of offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault.

A close friend of Ms Davies said at the time of the court case she had “so much going for her”.

Speaking in 2013, Annabel Aynsley, of Lampeter, said Ms Davies “loved life”, adding she had no idea why the woman she was at school with from eight to 18 in a Malvern prepatory school and later Cheltenham, became involved with a Maoist group in London.

“I think it’s quite extraordinary.

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

Speaking to the Cambrian News in 2016, former Ceredigion County Council leader Dai Lloyd Evans, who knew the Davies family well,said he believes the sudden and unexpected death of her father “left a deep mark” on his daughter.

“She probably, in her hour of weakness, turned to somebody for some support,” he 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 the subsequent 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.

Balakrishnan was jailed for 23 years in 2016 after being convicted of offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault.

Balakrishnan died in HMP Dartmoor last Friday, the Prison Service said.

It added that the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman had been informed.