Aravindan Balakrishnan, known to his followers as "Comrade Bala", was born in Kerala, India but migrated to Singapore, Malaya, where his father was a soldier. Balakrishnan ran the cult, called the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, from a London HQ. On 21 November 2013 Metropolitan Police from the Human Trafficking Unit arrested two suspects at a residential address in Lambeth, South London. A 73-year-old ethnic Indian Singaporean man, Aravindan Balakrishnan, and a 67-year-old Tanzanian woman, his wife, Chanda Pattni, had been investigated for slavery and domestic servitude.

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