Nice to see that the cover up as to why the authorities did not do anything about Axel Rudakubana who killed 3 little girls at a dance studio in July 2024 is already gathering steam. Some of the details of the missed opportunities together with an indication of how the cover-up (sorry – public inquiry) will run are included in this Guardian article.
A few comments:
- The Guardian keeps referring to “safeguarding officials”. What are these? Are they social workers, or something else?
- It would appear, see 1., that his threats to kill, viewing of genocide material, possession of knives, history of violence etc. was all viewed through the prism of “safeguarding”, that is as if his welfare was the issue. That would possibly suggest that “safeguarding” has gone too far.
- It has been reported that when the “safeguarding officials” made their monthly welfare checks on Rudakubana in the months leading up to his murder spree they took along a police security team. I don’t work in social services but my impression is that it is really rare for social services staff, (or “safeguarding officials”, whatever they are), to have a pre-emptive police bodyguard. Why? Because, one imagines, the logic is that if they are visiting someone “in the community” then that person is considered safe to be “in the community”. Clearly, as far as their personal safety was concerned these “safeguarding officials” did not think they were safe. But, and here’s the rub, the general public was expected to take the risk…
- This latest account includes the gem that when he was 15 (“two years before the Southport attack”) police found him on a bus with a knife. They didn’t arrest and charge him; they took him home and gave his Mum some advice about keeping knifes out of reach. Nb. this was not a toddler playing with matches. In connection with this I noticed today that in another tragic case – a the knife murder of a 12 year old child in Birmingham the Chief Superintendent of that police force Richard North is reported thusly: “Mr North said anyone who is found carrying a knife over the age of criminal responsibility faced a ‘very high chance’ of being arrested and brought into custody.” A “very high chance of being arrested”. Some members of the public might be surprised to hear that arrest of youths carrying knives is not automatic. It obviously wasn’t for Rudakubana in a different area.
- The Guardian article cites a “police source” as pre-empting the enquiry, saying it will find that the issue was a lack of inter agency communication. This has been going on for decades – this line about falling though inter-agency cracks. It is just not credible. Firstly; in this case it isn’t true. The police had enough information based on their own systems to have known there was a problem. It is clear they were involved in all the main incidents from the initial Childline “What should I do if I want to kill somebody?” to the follow-up assault, for which he was prosecuted, to the bus knife incident, to the welfare check when he was skipping the special school, to the assault (alleged) on his father. As far as skipping school goes – many parents get fined if their children miss just a few days; yet this boy apparently had an attendance rate of something like 1%. But, no fine, for some reason. Secondly; since it was the police who referred the murderer to be to Lancashire County Council they must have also known about his involvement with social services or “safeguarding officials”. Thirdly; I really doubt that the Prevent referrals were not or could not have been entered into the Police National Computer in the “free information” box. [1] And, as far as the “safeguarding officials” department goes at the Council; see point 3) above; if Rudakubana was so dangerous why was he not sectioned? “Falling through the cracks” is the classic escape route whenever two systems/criminals/organisations are involved together in something and it goes wrong; each blames the other. But – all the signs are that both Lancashire County Council and the police independently failed.
There appear to be other questions. As usual the media does a fantastic job of not giving any concrete details. For example; how was he able to buy a knife (2 apparently) on Amazon when he was 17? You need a credit or debit card. He cannot have had a credit card. He might have had a debit card but it would have been one for teens. Do banking systems not send that information to Amazon via their API? I bet they do. (They certainly could). Did he use someone else’s account? (Up till now media has been reporting that Rudakubana used “security software” when he shopped on Amazon. Todays’s DM reports that was a VPN which he used to hide his IP because he was under 18. But this is all ‘smoke and mirrors’ intended to protect Amazon and the authorities by making it sound like Amazon was outwitted by Rudakubana. However, in reality, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference; age is not detected by IP address and using a VPN brought Rudakubana no advantages). We are told he also bought a sufficiently large quantity of beans to produce a lot of ricin with. Did his parents not notice lots of beans and wonder why? The media reports that two weeks before the murder spree his father stopped him just as he was about to get into a taxi and go off to a former school. He wasn’t going to say “hi” to his old school mates. Did he have a knife with him then? Did Dad know? Did Dad report this episode (knife or not)?
Update – Rudakubana was signalling this loud and clear
More information is finally seeping out. With the knife incident at school when he was 13 Rudakubana phoned Childline and asked; “what should I do if I want to kill someone?”. Following these threats to take a knife to his school he was moved to a pupil referral unit. In his interview there he was asked why he had taken a knife to his school. He replied; “to use it”. The Guardian laughably refers to this as “childlike honesty” [2]. In reality this was defiance, a challenge, and a warning. When he was stopped by police on the bus at 15 with a knife (and taken home to Mummy) he told police he wanted to stab someone. [2] It is not as if Rudakubana wasn’t announcing his intentions loud and clear. It seems part of the problem is no one was paying attention, or, if they even heard it, they treated it like the Guardian author – as “childlike”. They did not understand that he meant it, literally. They are displaying a kind of “neurotypical blindness”. If Rudakubana had been like them, neurotypical (though I have problems with this word), then yes, it might have been “childlike honesty”. But he was autistic. When he said “to use it”, he meant it quite fucking literally. They just didn’t get it. What are the chances that increasing police and “safeguarding official” awareness of autism are going to be in the list of recommendations from the public inquiry?
Summary
Having noted that (and for once I am forced to agree with Keir Starmer) that the signs of a huge failure leap out at one there does remain a problem. In a liberal society governed by the rule of law – it is hard to throw someone in jail on the basis of what they might do. But, a mechanism does exist, for precisely this; sectioning, (forced committal to a mental hospital, made possible under the Mental Health Act 1983). The boy was known to “safeguarding officials” to be obsessed by genocide, he had a history of serious violence, he had been stopped with a knife, he had a mental health diagnosis, he had assaulted his father. It appears to me that this constituted sufficient grounds for him to have been sectioned. Alternatively; robust policing, for example, sending him to jail for possession of a knife when he was 15 could have disrupted him and led to a more containable incident.
Final hint – throwing Rudakubana at men is not going to help either. [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/26/no-the-southport-killers-motive-is-not-difficult-to-comprehend-its-called-misogyny] The suggestion that Rudakubana is at “the end of a spectrum” on which sit all men, (the author doesn’t exactly say this but this is implicit as a suggestion). is even further off the mark than “childlike honesty”. In her preprogramed apparent (and strangely permitted in print) hatred of men the author seems to miss out various key facts of the case. Rudakubana’s one prior conviction for violence was against … a male peer. Two weeks before the slaughter he made an apparent attempt to repeat violence against his former school, not an all girls school. The evidence is the other way and, as far as I know, there is no actual evidence for the supposed misogyny, other than inferences from the crime itself. If you want to make something of the dance class as a target a more informed psychological perspective might link it to Rudakubana’s early experiences aged around 13 in a youth dance club – around the time he seemed to go off the rails. Not all violence in which women are the victims is driven by misogyny. To attribute the case to societally embedded misogyny appears to be some kind of basic logical error. This is like saying that any crime when a black person is a victim is driven by racism; in any one case there may be a racial aspect, but in some cases maybe the victim just had a fat wallet. The author of this piece seems to have absolutely no idea about any aspect of this case. For example, she suggests that “none of the agencies” concluded that Rudakubana was “a danger to others or himself”. Prevent did not conclude he was not a danger. Prevent determined, correctly, that he was not an ideologically driven terrorist in the making, so he was out of scope for them. The “safeguarding officials”, as we mention above, clearly did conclude that Rudakubana was fucking dangerous. They just didn’t do anything about it, (except protect themselves). Probably because the case was out of their recipe book and they lacked the initiative to kick up a storm with someone.
Notes
- See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/06/counter-terror-police-are-running-secret-prevent-database . There is a Prevent database which the police can gain access to. I remain of the view that it is likely that Prevent data can be entered into the general intelligence field in the PNC as well.
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/axel-rudakubana-from-unassuming-schoolboy-to-notorious-southport-killer