Portrait of a killer: how the Southport murders are part of a new pattern of violent terror
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Last summer, three little girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift themed yoga and dance workshop in Southport. Bebe King, age six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, age seven, died of their wounds at the scene, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar died in hospital the next day.
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When police arrived they found Axel Rudakubana, aged 17, still holding the kitchen knife he had ordered online from Amazon. Disinformation about the killer’s identity proliferated, sparking weeks of racially motivated anti-immigration riots across the country.
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Rudakubana’s trial was due to begin this week, with the teenager having previously entered a not guilty plea. But on Monday, he plead guilty to all 16 charges: three of murder, 10 of attempted murder, one of possession of a knife, along with charges for the production of the biological toxin ricin, and for possession of a terrorism-related PDF file.
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With a guilty plea entered, there will be no trial and no exploration of the killer’s motives in court. Attention has turned to apparent missed opportunities to apprehend the teenager before he killed and maimed. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has launched an inquiry into the case to investigate how the killer “came to be so dangerous”. “I will not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure,” said Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “Failure which in this case, frankly, leaps off the page.”.
A former schoolmate described the killer to The Guardian as “a ticking time bomb”. The killer had been excluded from mainstream education in 2019 for bringing a knife to school, claiming he had been racially bullied. He returned to the school armed with a hockey stick with teacher and pupils names written on them, threatening to attack them. According to residents on his street, his father had stopped him from attempting to take a taxi to his former school just days before the attack.
