PETALING JAYA: The leader of a Maoist cult commune currently on trial in London has claimed that he killed a Malaysian leader named “Razak” after wishing for him to go to hell using an invisible “electronic satellite warfare machine”.

According to The Guardian, Aravindan Balakrishnan (pic), 75, told the court that he believed in the existence of an invisible machine, dubbed “Jackie” that he could control using his thoughts.

He said “Jackie” stood for “Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran”, adding that it was built by the Communist party of China and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

“It controls everything. In different ways, I could control it,” said Balakrishnan.

The Guardian reported him as saying that the machine was responsible for the recent Labour leadership contest in the UK, the Challenger air shuttle disaster as well as the death of a Malaysian leader named “Razak”.

He recounted how one day he had declared “hell to Razak” and the next day, Razak died.

The identity of Razak was not specified, although the Malaysian leader who bore that name was Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, Malaysia’s second prime minister, who served in that position from 1970 until his death in 1976.

Balakrishnan had allegedly run the Workers’ Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton starting from 1976.

Balakrishnan told the court that British colonial “cruelty” in Singapore, where he was brought up, motivated his political activities.

In 1963, he went to Britain in 1963 to study at the London School of Economics but felt that the UK was “passing off fascism as democracy”.

He said that by the time he set up his group in 1976, “Britain was attacking and destroying so many people, not just in Malaya but in so many parts of the world.”

Balakrishnan faces 16 charges, all of which he denied, including rape, sexual assault and assault of two women, and wrongful imprisonment and child cruelty in respect to his daughter, who was born in the secretive commune and escaped aged 30 having lived in almost total isolation for all of her life.

– The Star