Southport killer’s parents could have stopped attack and his autism was used  by officals as an excuse for his behaviour, damning inquiry concludes

The Southport attack ‘would not have happened’ if the killer’s parents had expressed concern about his increasingly violent behaviour, a report into the brutality said today.

High Court judge Sir Adrian Fulford, who oversaw the public inquiry into the atrocity, came to a series of damning conclusions, saying Axel Rudakubana’s mother and father had obstructed authorities, were ‘all too ready’ to excuse their son’s actions and had failed to challenge or set any limits on his behaviour.

Authorities were repeatedly sent warning signs in the weeks and years before the 17-year-old killed 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 the police, social services, mental health teams, youth justice services and other institutions left him free to kill with ‘chilling brutality’.

This atrocity was not a “sudden event”; rather, Rudakubana’s risk had been “pointed out” to the authorities for years, and the authorities “could and should have prevented” him from carrying out his murder spree.

Sir Adrian said authorities also used Rudakubana’s autism diagnosis to excuse his behaviour, failing to recognize that it actually increased the condition, not reduced the risk he posed.

Rudakubana was only 17 years old when he killed Bebe King (6), Elsie Stancombe (7) and Alice Aguiar (9) in a holiday club at the beginning of the summer holidays.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment and a minimum of 52 years behind bars after confessing to the murder in January last year.

Sir Adrian, head of the public inquiry examining how the attack was allowed to take place, said in his 700-page report that Rudakubana’s parents, Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire, should also take responsibility.

Mayor Sir Adrian Fulford will publish the first report of the inquiry at Liverpool City Hall today

Six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar were killed in the atrocity on July 29, 2024.

They knew he had amassed a small arsenal of ‘deadly weapons’ in his bedroom for at least a week before the attack, but they did nothing.

Sir Adrian said: ‘If AR’s parents had done what they morally should have done, AR would not have had the freedom to carry out the attack and therefore this attack would not have happened.’

Instead of taking responsibility for Rudakubana’s case, the agencies put him on a ‘merry-go-round’ of referrals, assessments and handovers.

“AR’s descent into grave violence has been repeatedly and clearly marked,” the judge said.

‘Yet the systems and institutions responsible for protecting the public did not act with the necessary cohesion, urgency and clarity.’

He added: ‘I have no doubt that if appropriate procedures had been followed and sensible steps had been taken by the institutions and AR’s parents, this terrible incident would not have happened.

‘It could have happened and should have been prevented. History would certainly have taken a different path.’

The judge said that “over a long period of time” Rudakubana became “an aggressive, almost completely reclusive individual who bullied and threatened his family and shamelessly lied to the authorities”.

He managed to order and amass an arsenal of weapons, including knives, crossbows, bows and arrows, machetes, sledgehammers, as well as items needed to make numerous Molotov cocktails and ingredients for the production of the highly lethal poison ricin.

However, Sir Adrian said that what happened on July 24, 2024 was not “a bolt of lightning from the blue sky”.

On the contrary, Rudakubana’s dangerousness had been ‘clearly, repeatedly and clearly marked over the years’.

Authorities who contacted him expressed many times that they feared he would continue to ‘harm and kill’.

But despite this, Sir Adrian said ‘no coordinated or effective action’ had been taken.

He said: ‘One of the most striking consequences… is the sheer number of missed opportunities over many years to intervene meaningfully, which directly contributed to the failure to prevent this disaster.

‘Many systems that were supposed to provide surveillance, assessment and protection were ineffective or underutilized. Some failed completely. ‘The results were disastrous.’

Rudakubana was photographed wearing the distinctive green hoodie he wore on the day of the attack. CCTV cameras captured him outside the Hart Space dance studio in Southport shortly before he launched the mass stabbing.

Police and forensic teams on Hart Street, Southport, following the stabbing

Rudakubana was a former stage school star who appeared in a BBC Children In Need commercial at the age of 11.

Rudakubana was recognized by the state as of October 2019; The then-13-year-old boy called Childline several times, claiming he was being bullied, and admitted to taking a kitchen knife to school 10 times.

The police were called and he was expelled, but he returned two months later with a hockey stick and attacked another student, breaking his wrists.

He was sent to a special school and made three referrals to the Government’s counter-radicalisation programme, Prevent, over concerns about what he was consuming online; He had perused web pages about school shootings in America, commented on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and also wanted to see a picture of a severed head.

Rudakubana was also referred to mental health teams multiple times.

But he was reluctant to meet with authorities and Sir Adrian said his most “missed opportunity” came in March 2022 when he disappeared from home and was found with a knife on a bus while telling police he wanted to stab someone. He also admitted that he considered 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 a search of his home would have found ‘critical information’ about the ricin seeds he had already purchased and the terrorist material downloaded onto his computer.

Instead he was treated as a ‘vulnerable’ person and allowed to return home only with referrals to social services and mental health teams.

Sir Adrian’s report comes after nine weeks of hearing often harrowing ‘phase one’ evidence from victims, survivors, first responders and organizations that interacted with Rudakubana in the lead-up to the attack.

Hearings into the ‘phase two’, which are expected to consider how agencies deal more generally with the risks posed by young people determined to commit acts of extreme violence, are expected to begin later this year.