Parents of a ‘sadistic’ teenager who carried out the Southport massacre need to be jailed for failing to stop his killing spree, a lawyer for his victims said today.
Chris Walker, who represents the parents of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, said he understood current legislation made it ‘difficult’ for Axel Rudakubana’s mother and father to be prosecuted.
But he said they had ‘blood on their hands’ and he believed it was ‘correct’ for them to be incarcerated for failing to stop their son’s murder spree.
‘The apology we heard (from parents of Rudakubana) was rejected by the families, I call for them personally to be incarcerated for their lack of foresight and for not preventing the attack, I firmly believe that’s correct,’ Mr Walker told Today on BBC Radio 4 .
He added: ‘They should go to prison. They have blood on their hands.’
In his damning report, published yesterday, Sir Adrian Fulford, chairman of the public inquiry, said Alphonse Rudakubana, 50, and Laetitia Muyazire, 54, must take some blame for the atrocity.
The report found that they knew Rudakubana was hoarding weapons, including machetes, for at least a year before the July 2024 attack, and had planned to target his former school the week before.
They saw other weapons and a suspicious substances – later discovered to be ingredients for the deadly poison ricin – in his bedroom, and found packaging for a knife when he left the house on the day of the attack, the retired High Court judge said.
‘They reported none of this,’ Sir Adrian added.
Merseyside police investigated the couple, who sought asylum in the UK after fleeing the genocide in their home country of Rwanda, but on Monday the force confirmed there was not enough evidence to prosecute.
Mr Walker said he welcomed Sir Adrian’s recommendation that new legislation be considered to compel anyone to report such criminality, or face prosecution themselves.
‘There should be individual criminal accountability for the parents,’ he added.
‘The legal framework as it currently stands makes that very difficult, and so phase two (of the inquiry) has to adopt a legal process of parental responsibility.
‘There is a moral obligation to protect society at large from a murderer whose intent is to cause mass murder. There (also) has to be a legal obligation.’
Mr Walker also said that five public bodies, whose failings were highlighted in the 760-page report, and their individual members of staff, were also ‘equally culpable.’
Today he said he would ‘name and shame’ individual managers and workers at those agencies, including Lancashire Police, Lancashire County Council, NHS mental health teams and the Government’s Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, if bosses failed to sack or discipline them for ‘appalling’ mistakes that left Rudakubana unmanaged and free to kill.
‘If those disciplinary proceedings are not concluded to our satisfaction, then I know the names of those people, I know the names of the people who failed and I will state them publicly if I need to,’ Mr Walker said.
‘I will go through it all in a public environment so the world will know of their failings.’
The solicitor, who is based at Bond Turner, in Liverpool, gave the example of the incident of March 2022, when police officers from Lancashire Police failed to arrest Rudakubana when he was found on a bus with a knife.
By that stage the teen already had a conviction for violence, after he attacked a pupil at his former school with a hockey stick, and had also admitted to previously taking a knife into lessons on 10 occasions.
Police Constable David Fairclough, one of the probationary police officers who attended the incident, admitted in his evidence to the inquiry that it was a mistake for him not to tell his superior, Police Sergeant Daniel Clarke, that Rudakubana had a previous conviction for violence.
As a consequence, Ps Clarke advised Pc Fairclough to make a ‘high risk’ vulnerable child referral, instead of detaining the then 15-year-old.
In his report, Sir Adrian expressed ‘concern’ about the speed at which Rudakubana was ‘diverted away from a criminal justice outcome’ by this decision.
He said: ‘I do not agree that it was within the range of reasonable options to take an individual, with a conviction for a previous violent offence and for possession of a knife, found in possession of a knife in public, home to his parents.’
The inquiry heard that on the way back to the family home, in Banks, near Southport, a ‘smiling’ Rudakubana told Pc Fairclough that he wanted to use the knife to ‘stab someone’ and also made reference to making poison.
Had he been arrested at this point police would have searched his home and discovered the castor beans he had purchased to make ricin, Sir Adrian said.
His computer would also have been seized, on which he had downloaded the Al-Qaeda training manual, and he would likely have received a custodial sentence, the judge added.
Mr Walker told GB News: ‘He (Rudakubana) confessed that he was going to stab people on the bus, and he had developed poison, which he had enough doses for 12,000 people. The police chose not to arrest him. They had a confession of a convicted criminal with intent to force harm with a knife and they chose not to arrest him.
‘I say that if they had had arrested him on that occasion, then the whole attack would have been prevented. They would have found the arsenal of weapons, they would have found him the ricin, and this horror movie would not have occurred.’
Other organisations and individuals singled out in Sir Adrian’s report were the child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), including Dr Anthony Molyneux, a psychiatrist at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, in Liverpool, who looked after Rudakubana’s mental health until he was discharged around three months before the attack.
Dr Molyneux told the inquiry he thought Rudakubana was ‘an unremarkable, sullen…teenage boy.’
But Sir Adrian described the medic – who admitted he didn’t know that Rudakubana had been caught with a knife and had a conviction for violence because he hadn’t read all his medical notes – as ‘defensive.’
He was ‘unprepared to accept’ that mistakes had been made by him and by CAMHS more broadly, and it was ‘concerning’ that he was unprepared to reflect or recognise learning points from the tragedy, Sir Adrian concluded.
The chairman of the inquiry was also critical of workers at Lancashire County Council, including social worker Suzanne Walmsley, who the report revealed has been referred to her professional regulator over her individual failings.
Sir Adrian found it took 21 months for the council’s adult social care ‘Transition’s Team’ to assess Rudakubana after he was referred to them, ahead of his 18th birthday.
But the inquiry was told Ms Walmsley failed to write up her notes from that assessment, in November 2023, until after the attack more than eight months later. As a result, the assessment was not completed and no follow up was actioned.
The report found that ‘the Transitions Team achieved nothing’ and the referral ‘might as well not have happened.’
