Child murderer Axel Rudakubana’s migrant parents, police, and local officials all share blame for failing to prevent the Southport attacker from taking the lives of three innocent girls in 2024, a report has found.
Nearly two years ago, Alice da Silva Aguiar (9), Bebe King (6), and Elsie Stancombe (7) had their lives ripped away from them in a brutal mass stabbing attack by Rwandan-heritage Axel Rudakubana at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in the sleepy town of Southport in Merseyside, England. Eight other children and two adults were also injured in the vicious attack by the then-17-year-old.
A report published this week from retired judge Adrian Fulford, who led an inquiry into the murders, has found failures throughout, including from Rudakubana’s parents, police officers, and council officials, all of whom could have potentially prevented the mass stabbing had they meaningfully intervened.
The report was especially damning concerning the culpability of parents Alphonse and Laetitia, who migrated to Britain from the previously war-torn African nation of Rwanda. Fulford said that the “passive stance” taken by Rudakubana’s parents in the face of his earlier violent attacks prior to the massacre and his collecting of weapons constituted a “complete moral failure on their part.”
“I conclude that they bear a very considerable degree of responsibility for the appalling events” of the Southport Killings, given the failure to report their son to the police after having seen him attempt to take a knife to the Range High School just a week before the fatal attack at the children’s dance party. Fulford noted that had they done so, he would have been in custody at the time of the killings.
“That would have been the inevitable result because, it should be recalled, a search of [Axel Rudakubana’s] bedroom would have revealed the crude preparation of ricin, and a search of his electronic devices would eventually have revealed the academic article containing the Al-Qaeda training manual. The attack, accordingly, would never have occurred,” the former judge wrote.
“I accept that [Axel] had made their lives extremely difficult, but this complete abandonment of responsibility, given the danger they knew their son posed to others, was utterly unconscionable,” he said.
In addition to the migrant family, Fulford’s report also condemned the failure of local officials, police, and counter-terror agencies to “take ownership of the risk” that Rudakubana posed to the public, with the report consistently finding that various agencies sought to unload responsibility of the troubled teen.
For example, the report found that Lancashire Constabulary’s Community Safety team decided in December of 2019 that after Rudakubana had been referred to Prevent, it was up to the anti-terror programme to ensure that he no longer posed a threat to community safety. Meanwhile, Prevent had failed to pass his case to a deradicalisation panel on multiple occasions.
The Forensic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (FCAMHS) was found to have closed his case in March of 2020 despite having failed to carry out any structural assessment as to the risk Rudakubana posed to others.
The report found that the Lancashire Constabulary police force “repeatedly took the view that its role was complete” as Rudakubana had been referred to the Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH), “even when officers repeatedly attended at the same address.” This was made worse by the force routinely not receiving “any feedback from the MASH or other agencies as to what action was being taken.”
Police and other agencies were found to have displayed a “tendency ” to “excuse” Rudakubana’s violent behaviour on “the basis of his perceived or, later, confirmed autism spectrum disorder.”
The Lancashire County Council’s (LCC) Children’s Social Care (CSC) and Child and Family Wellbeing Service (CFWS) were also said to have “repeatedly” stepped down or closed his case despite their interventions failing to produce any meaningful change in his behaviour.
“Far too often, Rudakubana’s ‘case’ was passed from one public sector agency to another in an inappropriate merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and ‘hand-offs’. Agencies repeatedly passing the risk to others and closing/downgrading their own involvement is not effective – or responsible – risk management,” Fulford said.
“If, as a society, we are to avoid repetition of what happened in AR’s case, this culture has to end. This is the single most important conclusion of Phase 1 of this report. This failure lies at the heart of why AR was able to mount the attack, despite so many warning signs of his capacity for fatal violence.”
Responding to the report, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told parliament on Monday that the government has “introduced a new Prevent assessment framework with mandatory training for counter-terrorism case officers” and that there will be stricter requirements before cases are dismissed in the future.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer added: “I’m determined to make the fundamental changes needed to keep the public safe.”
However, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage — who was accused of sparking the riots that ensued after the mass stabbing for rightly questioning whether the attacker had been known to authorities and demanding to know his identity — said that he did not believe the government had learned from the attack.
“This report today absolutely vindicates everything I said at the time. A total failure at every level. A failure, yes, of course, of the parents. A failure of Prevent, to whom this guy was reported more than once. And a total failure of leadership from our Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, who did what he could to hide the truth about what really happened in Southport on that awful day because he’s terrified of saying anything that he fears might upset elements of the Muslim community,” he said.
“For once, we have a report that is not a whitewash. A report that tells the truth, but a report that also shows you I’m the one public figure in parliament prepared to stand up, to ask the right questions, whatever condemnation I receive,” Farage noted.
“I fear the result of all of this will be very little that will be done to protect little girls like this in the future. Yet what we may well get are laws on definitions of Islamophobia that make it even harder to ask the questions that I asked just 24 hours after that terrible, terrible day.”