The Southport attack ‘would not have occurred’ if the killer’s parents had flagged concerns about his increasingly violent behaviour, a report into the atrocity said today.
In a series of damning conclusions, Sir Adrian Fulford, the High Court judge overseeing the public inquiry into the atrocity, said Axel Rudakubana’s mother and father obstructed officials, were ‘too ready’ to excuse their son’s actions and failed to stand up to his behaviour or set any boundaries.
Warning signs about the risk posed by the 17-year-old were repeatedly flagged to authorities in the weeks and years before he murdered three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the Merseyside seaside town, in July 2024.
But in his report, published today, Sir Adrian said catastrophic failures by police, social services, mental health teams, youth justice services and other agencies left him free to kill with ‘chilling brutality’.
The atrocity did not come as a ‘bolt out of the blue’, rather Rudakubana’s risk had been ‘signposted’ to state agencies for years and they ‘could and should have prevented’ him from carrying out his murder spree.
Officials also used Rudakubana’s diagnosis of autism to excuse his behaviour and failed to recognise that, in truth, the condition heightened, not lessened the risk he posed, Sir Adrian said.
Rudakubana was just 17 when he murdered Bebe King, six, Elsie Stancombe, seven, and Alice Aguiar, nine, at a holiday club at the start of the summer holidays.
He was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum 52 years behind bars after admitting murder in January last year.
Today Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the Government was ‘determined to learn the lessons identified by the inquiry and to take the necessary action to reduce the risk of such an attack happening again.’
Downing Street also reiterated that the Southport killings must be a ‘line in the sand.’
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: ‘This must be a moment of fundamental change for how we protect our citizens and our children.’
In his 700-page report, Sir Adrian, chairman of the public inquiry examining how the attack was allowed to happen, said Rudakubana’s parents, Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire, must bear responsibility.
They knew, at least a week before the attack, that their son had amassed a small arsenal of ‘deadly weapons’ in his bedroom, and that he had planned an attack on his old school a week before, but did nothing.
Sir Adrian said: ‘If AR’s parents had done what they morally ought to have done, AR would not have been at liberty to conduct the attack and it would not therefore have occurred.’
Instead of taking responsibility for Rudakubana’s case, agencies passed him around on a ‘merry-go-round’ of referrals, assessments and handovers.
‘AR’s trajectory towards grave violence was signposted repeatedly and unambiguously,’ the judge said.
‘Yet the systems and agencies responsible for safeguarding the public did not act with the cohesion, urgency or clarity required.’
He added: ‘I have no doubt that if appropriate procedures had been in place and if sensible steps had been taken by the agencies and AR’s parents, this dreadful event would not have happened.
‘It could have been and it should have been prevented. History simply would have taken a different course.’
The judge said that ‘over a long period of time’, Rudakubana had become ‘an aggressive, near-total recluse, who bullied and threatened his family and unashamedly lied to officials’.
He managed to order and hoard an arsenal of weapons, including knives, crossbows, bows and arrows, machetes, sledgehammers, as well as the items needed for making multiple Molotov cocktails and ingredients necessary for manufacturing the highly lethal poison, ricin.
But Sir Adrian said that what happened on July 24, 2024, was not a ‘bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky’.
Rather, Rudakubana’s dangerousness had ‘been clearly, repeatedly and unambiguously signposted over many years’.
On more than one occasion officials who came into contact with him expressed a fear that he would go on to ‘harm and kill’.
But, despite this, Sir Adrian said no ‘coordinated or effective action’ was taken.
He said: ‘One of the most striking conclusions… is the sheer number of missed opportunities over many years to intervene meaningfully, which directly contributed to the failure to avert this disaster.
‘Numerous systems that should have provided oversight, assessment and protection were ineffective or inadequately used. Some failed outright. The consequences were catastrophic.’
Rudakubana was known to the state from October 2019, when the then 13-year-old made several calls to Childline and admitted taking a kitchen knife into school on 10 occasions because he claimed he was being bullied.
Police were called and he was expelled but two months later, he returned, armed with a hockey stick and attacked another pupil, breaking their wrist.
He was sent to a special school, who made three referrals to the Government’s de-radicalisation programme, Prevent, over concerns about what he was consuming online – he had viewed web pages about school shootings in America, made comments about the conflict between Israel and Palestine and also asked to see an image of a severed head.
Rudakubana also was repeatedly referred to mental health teams.
But he was reluctant to engage with officials and the most ‘striking missed opportunity,’ Sir Adrian said, came in March 2022, when he went missing from home and was found with a knife on a bus, telling police he wanted to stab someone. He also admitted to thinking about using poison.
Sir Adrian said that, if police officers had had ‘a remotely adequate understanding of AR’s risk history’ he would likely have been arrested and ‘critical information’ about the ricin seeds he had already bought and the terrorist material downloaded on his computer would have been discovered during a search of his home.
Instead he was treated as a ‘vulnerable’ person and allowed home with only a referral to social services and mental health teams.
Sir Adrian’s report comes after he heard nine weeks of often harrowing ‘phase one’ evidence from victims, survivors, first responders and organisations who interacted with Rudakubana in the lead up to the attack.
Hearings for ‘phase two’, which is expected to consider how agencies address the risk posed by young people fixated on committing acts of extreme violence more generally, are due to begin later this year.
