London slave could be missing leftist Siti Aishah, says ex-activist

Hishamuddin Rais says that the Malaysian held captive in London for more than 30 years could be could Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Nazir Sufari, November 26, 2013.A 69-year-old Malaysian woman held as a slave in a London "collective" for some 30 years could be Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab, who went missing years ago, says former student activist Hishamuddin Rais.

She was one of three women freed on October 25 in London after one of them secretly contacted a charity. The other two are a 57-year-old Irish woman and a 30-year-old Briton.

British police have yet to identify any of them but said a couple have been held in connection with the case.

Hishamuddin, who went into self-exile in London in the 1970s, said Siti Aishah was active with Malaysian students in a leftist group that called itself "New Malayan Youth" in the British capital city at that time.

"Her brother sought me in 1991 to get assistance to find Aishah, who was said to be missing, as both of us come from the same district," Hishamuddin told The Malaysian Insider early today.

"I also lived in Brixton, London, where the woman was found," said Hishamuddin, who runs a blog called "TukarTiub".

He said that Siti Aishah followed Marxist-Leninist teachings and had studied the thoughts of Communist China leader, the late Mao Zedong.

The "New Malayan Youth" was mainly made up of left-leaning students from Malaysia and Singapore living in London in the 1970s.

Hishamuddin, who returned to Malaysia in 1994, said that Siti Aishah had studied in the exclusive Tunku Kursiah College in Seremban and furthered her studies in quantity surveying in London under a Colombo Plan scholarship.

Hishamuddin said he came from the same district of Jelebu in Negri Sembilan as Siti Aishah, adding that her sister was his teacher in secondary school. Hishamuddin lived in London for 15 years while studying in Brixton College. He later studied film and video at the University of Westminster, London. His last address was Coldharbour Lane, Brixton.

British dailies named those arrested as Indian-born Aravindan Balakrishnan, also known as "Comrade Bala" and his Tanzanian wife Chanda but Hishamuddin said the man was also called "Chairman Ara" and was from Singapore.

Police have confirmed that the couple were arrested in the 1970s, without disclosing any details.

Detectives have refused to confirm the identities of the couple, who are now on bail until January, pending further investigations but said the captive women were brainwashed and had reported being beaten but did not appear to have been sexually abused.

They were occasionally allowed out of the house and detectives are working to understand the "invisible handcuffs" that were used to control them.

Police revealed on Saturday that the two older victims had met their male captor through a "shared political ideology" and initially lived with him as part of a collective. Police said on Monday they were investigating 13 addresses linked to the couple, who came to Britain in the 1960s and are suspected of immigration offences as well as involvement in forced labour.

Detectives carried out house-to-house inquiries at the weekend in Brixton, one of London's poorer, more ethnically diverse districts that was the scene of anti-government riots in the 1980s.

The exact address where the women were held at have not been identified, but the police operation was centred on a modern, low-rise block of flats in Brixton's Peckford Place.