Public inquiry into Southport attack announced

A public inquiry will be launched into the Southport attacks, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced.

It comes after 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to murdering three girls: six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar.

Cooper said their families “needed answers” about the lead-up to the attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the city last year.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who will address the nation on the case at 0830 GMT on Tuesday, said “serious questions need to be answered” about how the state “failed” to protect the three girls.

Sir Keir described Rudakubana as “despicable and sick” and said: “Britain will rightly demand answers, and we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit.”

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, had been referred to the Prevent program three times between December 2019 and April 2021, when he was 13 and 14 years old, Cooper said.

The killer was already known to police, courts and social services, she said, “yet those agencies failed to recognize the appalling risk and danger to others he posed.”

Rudakubana admitted 16 charges, including the murder of the three girls on July 29 last year, while entering not guilty pleas on his behalf at a court hearing in December last year.

He also pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of eight children and two adults, possessing a knife on the day of the murders, producing a biological poison, ricin, and possessing an Al-Qaeda training manual – a terrorist crime.

There has been criticism that the authorities are withholding information about Rudakubana’s interest in violence and terrorism from the Conservatives and Reform UK.

However, Cooper said lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service had been clear that these details “could not be made public before today to avoid jeopardizing the legal process or biasing the potential jury trial, in accordance with normal rules of the British legal system”.

Now that a guilty plea has been reached, Cooper said: “It is vital that the families and people of Southport can get answers about how this terrible attack happened and why this happened to their children.”

She added that the Home Office had commissioned an urgent Prevent Learning Review into the three referrals relating to Rudakubana over the summer and that further details of that review would be published this week, alongside new reforms to the Prevent program.

Cooper acknowledged that “a growing number of teenagers” were being referred to the Prevent program, or investigated by counter-terrorism police or other agencies, due to fears of “serious violence and extremism”.

“We need to face up to why this happened and what needs to change,” she added.

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp welcomed the public inquiry into the “devastating attack”, saying the girls’ families “deserve answers… to ensure this never happens again”.

“There are many questions that remain unanswered about what went wrong,” he said.

“We also need to know who in the government knew what and when, and why authorities withheld certain information from the public.

“As Jonathan Hall, independent assessor of terrorism legislation, has said in the past, openness at an early stage is important to maintain public confidence.”

Britain’s reform leader Nigel Farage called the handling of the Southport case “one of the worst cover-ups” he had seen in his life and complained that he had raised questions about whether Rudakubana was known to authorities , but that he received ‘no answer’ and that he had received no answer. instead “completely vilified”.

Following the legal proceedings, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy denied there was a cover-up.

She said: “We have been accused of deliberately withholding information – this is absolutely not the case.

“From day one we have been as open as possible and have been in constant contact with the CPS, who have advised us on what information could be released.

“We wanted to say a lot more to show that we were open and transparent, but we were told all the time that we couldn’t do that because it would risk preventing justice from being served.”

“We will never know why he did it,” she said, adding: “What we can say is that all those documents did not reveal any ideology, and that is why this is not considered terrorism was treated.”

The BBC has learned that Rudakubana had been referred to Prevent before the attack over concerns about his general obsession with violence.

In December 2019, Rudakubana – then 13 years old – returned to the school from which he had been expelled and attacked a student with a hockey stick, breaking his wrist.

The same year he had told the NSPCC’s Childline that he was going to take a knife to school due to racist bullying, which passed the threshold for referral to local authorities.

Ursula Doyle, the CPS prosecutor, said outside court on Monday that Rudakubana was “a young man with a sickening and persistent interest in death and violence – he has shown no signs of remorse”.

Counter-Terrorism Police Chief Matt Jukes said a thorough investigation would take place now that Rudakubana had pleaded guilty.

“The same determination we showed in the investigation will now be applied to investigating how the range of agencies involved with Rudakubana failed to come together effectively to identify and address the risk he posed,” he said.

Rudakubana will be sentenced on Thursday and is expected to receive a life sentence.

However, he cannot be sentenced to life imprisonment for his crimes because he is under 21 years old.