In July 2024 Axel Rudakubana the son of immigrants from Rwanda murdered 3 children. He was 17. He had, apparently, spent most of the last 2 years at home where he spent his days looking at death porn on his computer and buying knives, in full view of his parents. The parents did not notice or did not care about the efforts to produce ricin. Before his crime he was being seen by two workers from the local authority. They thought he was so dangerous they would only see him with police protection. (The media has been very vague about exactly who these people were; they don’t seem to have been social workers, but what role they had I am not sure). Axel Rudakubana is/was autistic and had been going to a special school at one point.
The report into this matter has just been released. The Guardian reports on it here. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read the report. It is 700 pages long. (I wonder how how much money was made by lawyers and others out of the inquiry). * I am relying on Josh Halliday’s summary and the brief summary of the inquiry itself as well as some searches on the 2 volumes of the report. (These can be accessed at the links below). I reproduce the summary here:
Key Findings
The Report opens with a chapter ‘Fundamental problems’ and concludes that the attack was foreseeable and avoidable, highlightingfive major areas of systemic failure:
Absence of risk ownership: No agency or multi-agency structure accepted responsibility for assessing and managing the grave risk posed by the perpetrator.
Critical failures in information sharing: Essential information was repeatedly lost, diluted or poorly managed across agencies.
Misunderstanding of autism: AR’s conduct was wrongly attributed to his autism spectrum disorder, leading to inaction and a failure to address dangerous behaviours.
Lack of oversight of online activity: AR’s online behaviour, which provided the clearest indications of his violent preoccupations, was never meaningfully examined.
Significant parental failures: AR’s parents did not provide boundaries, permitted knives and weapons to be delivered to the home, and failed to report crucial information in the days leading up to the attack. [1]
Notice the systemic failure.
The current Home Secretary has given a statement:
There was a failure by the agencies involved to take responsibility and nobody was clear who was in charge. So the failure, because it belonged to everyone, belonged to no-one. [2]
I could have told you beforehand, (maybe I did), the inquiry will find that was a systemic failure and “no one individual was to blame”. It will call for new laws. In this case the inquiry has called for a new agency “He urged ministers to establish a dedicated agency to oversee complex offenders such as Rudakubana.” [3] and of course there is a proposal for new laws; the inquiry chair has indicated he may consider new laws about internet use and at risk young people in phase 2 of his inquiry. (Yes, it goes on. Why stop the gravy train of a public inquiry when you can milk it for more *).
This is what always happens. Always. Always. Always. Systemic failures. No one individual to blame. (Except, it seems the inquiry is willing to blame the parents up to a point). New powers or a new agency is needed. Amusingly enough, well it would be amusing if it wasn’t for the circumstances, the inquiry chair apparently talked about a “complete failure of Britain’s multi-agency model”. [4] This summary by a Guardian journalist accurately covers this:
This manifested in a number of ways, including a disturbing lack of clarity as to who, if anyone, was the lead agency, which persisted through the Inquiry’s hearings. Witnesses in appropriate positions were asked who was responsible for AR’s risk. There was no consistent response. No agency was prepared
to accept that it had the lead role in managing the risk that AR posed to others, with the sole and partial exception of the Child and Youth Justice Service (CYJS) which acknowledged it was responsible for assessing the risk posed by AR during the life of his referral order between February 2020 and
January 2021.[1]
The point being that the “muti-agency model” was itself the specific result of recommendations from reviews of previous atrocities. Do you get a kind of circular feeling?
Do you feel sick? I do. On one heartening note, at last, one public figure, albeit retired, is calling for personal accountability:
What you need to do is pinpoint exactly who didn’t take the responsibility they should have done and take disciplinary action.
This is all pointless if we don’t make people accountable for the errors they made. [5]
But – don’t hold your breath. The public sector’s instinct is always to protect itself and its own above all else.
Another sickening aspect. The Home Secretary has apparently used this report to make an ideological anti boy statement:
Mahmood said a wider issue of “boys whose minds are warped by time spent in isolation online” had been identified by the inquiry. [5]
This case has nothing to do with isolated boys at home. That may well be a problem. (And girls too; though it seems to be important to focus on boys). But if she, the Home Secretary, can’t see that autistic Axel Rudakubana, with his knife purchases on Amazon, ricin preparations. regular signalling to authorites he was going to do something really murderous, was a special case then she has learned nothing from this case. To hijack it for a routine ideological jab at boys and masculinity in general is really going low.
Which leads us onto the final point. I wondered if anywhere in these 700 pages there is any mention of the back story? Axel’s parents were immigrants from Rwanda. Previous media reporting has indicated that his Dad, (who ignored all the knives), was involved with a militia in Rwanda. This information has largely been suppressed but it did emerge briefly at one point, and here it is, in the Guardian:
“He was absolutely obsessed with genocides,” said one senior official. “He could name every genocide in history and how many people were killed – Rwanda, Genghis Khan, Hitler. It’s all he wanted to talk about.”
Rudakubana had a closer connection to genocide than most other British youths: his father, Alphonse, is thought to have fought with the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), an armed force that battled the Hutu-dominated regime in Rwanda and eventually brought an end to the mass ethnic killings of 1994.
Alphonse, now 49, is reported to have been an RPA officer, possibly relatively senior, based in neighbouring Uganda, where his family are thought to have fled well before the genocide. One source said Alphonse had acquired significant military experience. [6]
You don’t, surely, have to be a psychologist, to trace the connection?
I have searched the Internet high and low for information about how the father came to the UK. Was he an ‘asylum seeker? Nothing, but finally; we can find this information in the report itself. [2] He came as an asylum seeker. [2]
I have searched both the published reports from the inquiry for “militia” and “Rwanda”. it seems the inquriry did not altogther ignore this angle – but consider this:
It is easy to fall into the trap of simply demonising AR’s parents. To do so would be wrong for
three reasons……Second, as I address in more detail below, it is likely that AR’s parents were affected by
the psychological and personal consequences of the Rwandan genocide and
their subsequent flight from their country of birth. [2]
The inquiry chair is interested in how the father’s involvement in an armed group in Rwanda might excuse his behaviour. The sections in the report that deal with the Rwandan background seem to be mostly expressing sympathy for the mother who got distressed talking about knives – and who, conveniently enough, seems to have been unable to remember much of what led up to her son’s massacre. In passing, it turns out that the parents and the brother of Axel were all allowed to give evidence by video link.
I am 100% not anti-immigrant, though I think there should be a reduction in immigration numbers overall. But. 1. Why did the UK have to grant asylum to a refugee from the Rwandan genocide? I don’t want to sound harsh – but it wasn’t our problem. 2. Didn’t anyone consider at the immigration stage that a family who had fled a genocide might have some significant psyhologial problems? Given that they were accepted – what kind of support were they offered? Or, were they just waved in and left to get on with it? And, 3., above all, what is the fucking problem with us? Why is the inquiry chair falling over himself to show kindness and consideration to the mother of the murderer, even as he notes how the parents missed multiple opportunities to prevent their son’s crime? And to the other brother – who also appears to be “autistic”. The point is not, or definitely should not be, “these poor people suffered a lot in the Rwandan genocide so we can forgive them not doing anything when their son was openly ordering knives and planning his little genocide”, but “why did we let this disturbed family in, and given that we did, what steps were taken to supervise and manage them, given their obvious high-profile unstable background”. This question is, not surprisingly, entirely absent from the report.
I can really see why people really have had enough.
* I’ve sent an email requesting this information from the Home Office. Let’s see if they answer or obfuscate.
Notes
- https://www.southport.public-inquiry.uk/report/ Volume 1
- https://www.southport.public-inquiry.uk/report/ Volume 2
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/13/southport-inquiry-key-points-axel-rudakubana
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/13/southport-attack-blamed-on-catastrophic-failures-by-agencies-and-killers-irresponsible-parents
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/14/officials-errors-southport-murders-mistakes-accountabillity
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/20/axel-rudakubana-a-ticking-timebomb-who-murdered-three-girls-in-southport