Southport killer admitted carrying a knife more than 10 times

The Home Secretary stated that Southgate killer, Axel Rudakubana, admitted to carrying a knife more than ten times, yet was still able to purchase knives on Amazon. The Home Secretary said that public agencies "completely failed to identify the terrible danger he posed," with his obsession with extreme violence escalating in the years before he launched the attack.

On Monday, Rudakubana admitted to the murders of six-year-old Bibaa Henry, seven-year-old Elsie Dott-Stankom and nine-year-old Alice Da Silva-Aguiar in July last year. He is due to be sentenced on Thursday. This follows warnings from the Prime Minister that a "new and dangerous threat" is emerging from individuals obsessed with violence. A public inquiry into missed opportunities to stop Rudakubana has been announced.

The Home Secretary told the House of Commons that it was "utterly scandalous" that 17-year-old Rudakubana "easily ordered a knife on Amazon" despite a previous conviction for a violent crime against another child at school. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company has "launched an urgent investigation into this tragic case". The Home Secretary also said that there would be a "thorough review" of the counter-extremism programme "Prevent" after it emerged that Rudakubana had been referred to the programme three times between 2019 and 2021.

A preliminary review conducted this summer found that the "Prevent" program failed to flag Rudakubana as a serious threat because he did not demonstrate a commitment to a single radical ideology. The Home Secretary told the House of Commons that the three referrals came after Rudakubana expressed an interest in school shootings, the 2017 London Bridge attack, the IRA, MI5 and the Middle East. "There was an overemphasis on the absence of ideology," the Home Secretary said, when in fact Rudakubana was "obsessed with massacres or extreme violence." The Home Secretary said it was "intolerable" "to think that more could and should have been done" to stop him and that "the actions taken against him were too weak."

The Home Secretary stated that the public inquiry will be given all the powers needed to assess whether red flags were missed. Areas likely to be of interest include: five calls to Rudakubana's address from Lancashire police between October 2019 and May 2022 due to concerns about his behaviour; multiple referrals to safeguarding services, children’s social care and adolescent mental health services; a referral to the youth offending team after Rudakubana's conviction for a violent crime; concerns passed on to local authorities by Childline after calls during Rudakubana’s teenage years, including him revealing plans to take a knife to school due to racial bullying; and his school exclusions and truancy. "There are serious questions about how this network of agencies failed to identify and act on the risk," the Home Secretary said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer said in a statement in Downing Street that the failings of public agencies in the lead-up to the Southgate murders were "starkly clear". He said that it was "clearly wrong" that Rudakubana was deemed not to meet the threshold for "Prevent" intervention, and warned that the risk from "lone actors, disaffected individuals" radicalized online, not affiliated with formal extremist groups, was rising. On Monday, Rudakubana also admitted to possessing an al-Qaeda training manual - a terrorism offense. However, police never treated his case as terrorism-related as he did not appear to follow a single ideology. The Home Secretary said that terrorism laws will be reassessed in light of this.

The circumstances surrounding Rudakubana's crimes have prompted a wider review of the threat from what the government has described as a growing interest in extreme violence among young people. The Home Secretary told the House of Commons that 162 people were referred to "Prevent" last year with concerns relating to school massacres, which she called "a wider challenge of increasing youth violence and extremism". She added that the number of children being investigated for involvement in terrorism has tripled in three years. The government says that tech companies must remove the kind of extremist material that Rudakubana accessed online. "They should not be profiting from hosting content that is putting children's lives at risk," the Home Secretary said.

The opposition has put pressure on the government over the release of information to the public about Rudakubana’s crimes while he was under investigation, before his guilty plea. On Tuesday, shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said that "we need to know who in government knew what and when". But the Home Secretary said that he could have "walked free" if the government had released information that could have undermined Rudakubana’s ability to receive a fair trial under UK law. However, the Home Secretary acknowledged that the spread of disinformation on social media was "putting these long-standing rules under pressure" and said that contempt of court laws were being reviewed by the Law Commission. False information about Rudakubana's identity spread after the Southgate attack, fueling violent riots.

False posts widely circulated online claimed that Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff, was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK on a small boat. More than 1,000 people have been arrested and hundreds prosecuted and sentenced in the riots that followed. Rudakubana, from Banks in Lancashire, admitted to three counts of murder, as well as the attempted murder of a further eight children and two adults. He also admitted to possessing a knife on the day of the attack, producing a biological toxin (namely ricin), and possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.