KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 27 — A Maoist cult leader currently on trial in the UK has claimed that a Malaysian leader named “Razak” had died after he allegedly relayed his wish for the latter to go to “hell” through a mind-controlled “electronic satellite warfare machine”.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, said during the trial that he could use his thoughts to control the invisible machine dubbed “Jackie” or its full name “Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran”.

“It controls everything. In different ways, I could control it,” he was quoted as saying yesterday by UK daily The Guardian when referring to the purported machine allegedly constructed by China’s Communist party and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

According to The Guardian, Aravindan testified that he had on one occasion said “hell to Razak” and that Razak had died the next day, and also claimed that Jackie was tied to Nasa’s space shuttle Challenger disaster on the same day in 1986 when he attacked one of his communist commune members for challenging him.

The Guardian did not specify who this Malaysian leader was, but a notable figure bearing the name Razak is the late Tun Abdul Razak Hussein who served as Malaysia’s second prime minister from 1970 until his death on January 14, 1976.

The India-born man reportedly started running his Workers’ Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton, UK from 1976.

Aravindan, who grew up in Singapore, said the British’s alleged cruelty during the colonial days there had spurred on his political activities, claiming of mistreatment in British colonies when he started his group in 1976.

“Britain was attacking and destroying so many people, not just in Malaya but in so many parts of the world. There were British colonies which were being treated in an extremely bad way, and in Africa, under the name of democracy,” said the man who reportedly went to the UK for studies at the London School of Economics in 1963.

Aravindan is facing a total of 16 charges at London’s Southwark crown court, namely seven counts of indecent assault and four counts of rape against two women, three counts of actual bodily harm, one charge each of cruelty to a child under 16 and false imprisonment.

In 2013, he made headlines when three women including Malaysian Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab, then aged 69, were “rescued” from 30 years of alleged captivity in his Maoist commune by British police on October 25 that year.

Aravindan is charged with falsely imprisoning his daughter – one of the three women – for 30 years from the day she was born, but he reportedly called her a liar and testified that she went out with the other women once a week and was told that she could leave if she desired.