'The Southport Inquiry'
Understanding Axel Rudakubana will not prevent future attacks against us
It has been almost a year since the cataclysmic day that was the Southport Massacre. In the peak of the summer holidays, a hate-filled man entered a Taylor-Swift-themed dance class and attempted to murder every child there. He might have succeeded, and in someway he did. Three little girls were robbed of their lives in the cruelest possible manner. Ten more people continue to endure, daily, the life-altering injuries made to their bodies. And every single person involved – the victims, their families, witnesses, and emergency workers – will labour for the rest of their days with the shadow of fear cast over their lives by this thing we are forced to call ‘Axel Rudakubana’.
We are six months on from the court case that condemned Rudakubana to a minimum of 52 years in incarceration. This week an independent public inquiry into “what went wrong” has finally begun.
The UK Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper MP, states the ambition of this independent public inquiry is to understand how the killer “came to be so dangerous” and why Prevent – the UK’s anti-extremism scheme – “failed to identify the terrible risk” posed by Rudakubana.
To this end, a public inquiry feels arbitrary. In the moments after the trial, when the evidence of the attack had been laid bare for the public to see, there was a moment of almost collective recognition – that Axel Rudakubana did not fail to come to the attention of security authorities but had routinely, perhaps even deliberately, dismissed by them.
Thankfully, the chairman of the inquiry, Sir Adrian Fulford – a retired barrister, High Court Judge, and Lord Justice of Appeal – seems sensitive to the ongoing distress of the those impacted by the attack and the growing incredulity of the public towards “yet another inquiry”:
“I am deeply conscious that this is yet another public inquiry. The perpetrator’s responsibility is clear…There are grave questions about how this network of agencies failed to identify and act on the risks…This Inquiry is therefore expected to act as a real engine for change given the unparalleled nature of what occurred. I am determined it will not turn into an exercise of papering over the cracks.
— opening remarks of Sir Adrian Fulford, the ‘Southport Inquiry’
Adding to the Home Secretary’s remarks, Fulford states his ambition is to “analyse decisions that were or were not taken” in the lead up to the Southport Massacre.
Phase One – “What went wrong?”
The Southport Inquiry is to have two phases.
The first phase, due to conclude in November of this year, intends to analyse the personal history of Axel Rudakubana, including his personal relationships and his dealings with the agencies charges with his maintenance and monitoring. Axel Rudakubana’s elder brother – Dion Rudakubana – is reported to be taking part in the inquiry which has cause a great deal of distress and concern on the part of victims, their families, and the wider community. His presence is expected to impact victims feeling safe to speak out about their experiences. (More on this to follow.)
Questions will also be asked of local child welfare, mental health services, Police, and the Government’s ‘Prevent’ scheme. Particular attention will be devoted to how information about Rudakubana was shared between agencies and how risks were assessed and addressed.
This, of course, relies upon the supposition that information about the perpetrator was shared between agencies, that risks were identified, and that measures were put in place to mitigate these risks. But the ‘red flags’ are almost too numerous for anyone to believe Yvette Cooper’s declaration that Rudakubana had “fall[en] through so many gaps”.
To name just a few of these red flags:
A conviction in a children’s court for possession of a knife
A referral to the youth offending team after his conviction
Concerns passed on to the local authority by Childline after Rudakubana made several calls to them, one in which he disclosed he planned to take a knife to school
Attacking other students and staff whilst in school – including with a hockey stick in a corridor.
His exclusion and non-attendance at school – expelled from one school once and another one twice for violent offences.
Repeat visits by Police to Rudakubana’s home between October 2019 and May 2022 – Lancashire Constabulary officers responded to calls from Rudakubana's home address no less than five times. All calls related to his behaviour.
Repeat referrals were made to safeguarding services, children's social care and adolescent mental health services
Let us not forget, he was apprehended in the attempt to commit a mass attack on his old school – Range High – one week before he carried out the Southport Massacre.
Parents of the children who attended the same schools as Rudakubana confirmed the teenager was “well-known” in the community. As reported by Sky News, the daughter of local man, Dylan Pemberton, was three school years above Rudakubana but was still “very aware of him”:
Mr Pemberton: "I asked her, ‘Did you know the kid?’
"And she was like 'Yeah, he was well known'.
"He had tried to attack someone with a hockey stick outside my maths class.
"It was known to her and her peer group that he had a kill list."
The real question to be answered is not “If people knew…” about Rudakubana’s violent intentions but “How so many people knew without anyone preventing him from enacting more of his murderous fantasies?”
Phase Two – the rise of ‘extreme violence’
Phase two of the two-part inquiry will address how young people more broadly are drawn into extremism.
Unlike most senior politicians, Sir Adrian Fulford, seems to hint at some level of responsibility on the part of Rudakubana’s parents – a topic wholly neglected by the mainstream press. He asks how it was that Rudakubana could “order knives online at a young age and then leave home unsupervised.” However, Fulford also asserts that he is concerned with the “wider phenomenon of children and young people who are being drawn into extreme violence and what should be done to reverse the “troubling trend.”
It has been stated that there is a new kind of extremism emerging – young boys being radicalised towards ‘extreme acts of violence’ by content being found on the internet. In light of the Southport Massacre, the Government have changed the definition of ‘extremism’ to included those who are obsessed with extreme violence but who demonstrate no particular allegiance to proscribed ideologies – like ‘radical Islam’ or ‘neo-Nazism’.
I am not yet convinced of the existence of this ‘trend’ – at least, not of the theory as it is presently stands.
There are signs that a new problem may exist.
Hospital admissions for serious knife injuries in 10–17‑year‑olds rose by 47 per cent between 2013 and 2023 – but the total figures remain comparatively small compared to the general population of children this age – 318 cases increasing to 467 cases a year. This means that means approximate one in twelve thousand young people experience a knife injury significant enough for hospital treatment, but the numbers do not make a clear distinction between accidents, self-inflicted knife injuries, and violent assault.
The number of 16–24‑year‑olds killed in homocides involving knives has also increased by 82 percent between 2013 and 2023 – 87 cases rising to 99 cases.
Blame has been laid in different directions, including: cuts to public resources, drill rap music, absent fathers particularly in Afro-Carribean communities, and poverty. But a greater analysis as to the complexity of each of these issues would be needed before any definitive statement could be made upon the matter.
However, this is almost immaterial to this debate since I have reservations about Rudukubana being classed as one of these ‘vulnerable’ types of young men. Which is to say, I do not know how enlightening Rudakubana will be as a test-case: the model of an ‘adolescence drawn into extreme violence’ should not be modelled on him.
Axel Rudakubana is not Jamie from ‘Adolescence’
In the aftermath of attack in Southport, Axel Rudakubana has been liken to Jamie in the Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ — a thirteen year-old-boy who murders his classmate after being radicalised into a hatred of women by the online ‘manosphere’. Prime Minster Keir Starmer — who spent only 11 seconds at the memorial in Southport — so moved by this story of teenage extremism that he did a deal with Netflix to show TV drama in every state-school in the UK: a warning about the national rise of violent young men.
Despite what fiction writers or our Prime Minister might have us believe, Axel Rudakubana was born in circumstance utterly unfamiliar to the (all be it shrinking) majority of children living in England today.
Rudakubana was born to parents who claim to have fled to the UK from Rwanda in 2002 after the genocide of 1994. Rudakubana’s mother – Laetitia Muzayire – indicates on Facebook that she grieves for the loss of family and friends in the genocide, whilst Rudakubana’s father – Alphonse Rudakubana – is thought to have served in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which established the current government led by Paul Kagame.
Both parents lived isolated lives in the UK with few friends and an inconsistant employment record. The Rudakubana’s are thought to have spoken to their two sons about the genocide in graphic detail – discussions which, in turn, are thought to have been a catalyst in Axel Rudakubana’s "unhealthy obsession with extreme violence."
In my discussions with neighbours, I discovered the Rudakubana household was dysfunctional in more ways than one. Beyond the clutter and the mould on the curtains, colleagues of the parents report them as being unstable people — the mother in particular. Some neighbours think it is likely that the parents beat both of their sons, with one reporting that this tended to take place in the morning before before school and whilst playing ‘loud religious music.’
Police inquires have also concluded that Rudakubana seemed to have acted alone.
Contrary to consuming drill-wrap and ‘manosphere’ content, Rudakubana had collated thousands of academic papers upon despotic leaders, warfare, and genocides. In addition to the unabridged study of Al-Qaeda training manual, these papers covered the history of Nazi Germany, violence around Buddhism in Sri Lanka, clan cleansing in Somalia, Rwandan genocide, Iraq and Balkans conflict, victims of torture, tales of beheadings and cartoons depicting violence.
Titles in his possession included:
‘A place under heaven - Amerindian Torture and Cultural Violence’
‘The Mau Mau War: British Counterinsurgency in Colonial Kenya’
‘Death and survival during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’
‘Examination of punishments dealt to slave rebels in two 18th Century British Plantation Societies’
As I covered in January 2025, that these titles focus on of the oppression of black and 'indigenous' people by white, colonial Europeans, and the then-teenager espoused his desire for a "white genocide" and his belief that "Britain needs a genocide like Rwanda.” This is uncomfortable for the Establishment who proclaim that any immigrant born on British soil is equal, moral, and loyal by default, and, as a result, this dimension of his character has gone unexamined – at least in the Press.
I am not challenging the Police’s conclusion on Rudakubana’s motive, foremost because they have never settled on a conclusion. Whilst the fictional Jamie is characterised as being motivated by misogyny, it remains unclear to Police what motivated his attack on children at the Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Whilst some politicians and activist have asserted that the Southport Massacre was a misogynistic attack, this is mainly conjecture, and it is this filling of the vacuum with narratives which are convenience to one political cause or another to which I object.
The Police remain in the dark about how Rudakubana selected his target. Whilst, through my own research, I discovered Rudakubana had been particularly ‘beastly’ to the female residents and members staff at both of the secure children’s homes in which he had lived for a time – ignoring and physically intimidating them – his history of physical assaults have been against males and females and Rudakubana’s original target had been his school which is a mixed-sex school.
On the day in which he carried out the Southport Massacre, Rudakubana did not appear to know where he was going, leading investigators to conclude that Rudakubana had done little research on the target before he had set out to attack the dance class on Hart Street. The working theory of police investigators remains that Rudakubana had most likely been scrolling through Instagram looking for local events when an advert for the dance class came across his timeline.
This, in some manner, is more frightening for some than Rudakubana being motivated by any particular political ideology, for it introduces ‘randomness’ and ‘chance’ to which everyone is vulnerable. And so whilst understand the impulse to explain Rudakubana, and I whilst I give every support to the Southport Inquiry, I caution the panel presiding over this case to fit their theories to the facts of this crime and not the facts to their theories.
It is certain: the United Kingdom will see horrors of this magnitude again. Understanding why Axel Rudakubana was dismissed again and again and again by the people charged with protecting the nation from such criminals is crucial if it they are to prevent other would-be extremist from enjoying the same freedom Rudakubana enjoyed ahead of his attack. But I would ward the panelists, politicians, and policymakers away from using Axel Rudakubana as the model for new ‘anti-extremism’ measures. His circumstances which gave birth to him – in which he curated himself – are unique enough to be almost unrepeatable in nature.
We should not doom ourself – nor debase ourselves – to forever search the world for Axel-shaped holes when evil takes a million form.
You've done a great job on this Charlie, amazing work.
3rd world savages do third world savage acts.... it ain't that complicated