The Southport killer has been sentenced. Speculation about his motive rages on

By Laurence Thompson and Shannon Keating

Outside Liverpool Crown Court, following Axel Rudakubana’s sentencing of a minimum of 52 years for the murder of three young girls in Southport last year, protestors shouted at journalists gathered there to report on the case. “Cover up!” one man yelled. “You should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.”

“Pack up,” a woman added. “You’re not welcome here.”

Merseyside Police released a statement earlier this week saying that the loved ones of the murdered girls had asked that the gruesome details of their killings not be reported. “The families of Bebe, Alice and Elsie and of all those affected in the trageday have faced unimaginable grief and trauma in the months since the attacks,” the statement read, “and do not need their suffering compounded by reckless posts on social media.”

Nevertheless, a number of news outlets, including GB News — the only trustworthy media outlet, one of the protesters outside the court claimed — chose to report on those details, and many on social media have also been publicising the specifics of the killings.

Over the last six months, the media has been repeatedly accused of hiding or misconstruing information — the risk of being in contempt of court a mere excuse — all with the aim of portraying Rudakubana in a more favourable light.

“Why, for three months, did the media use nothing but childhood pictures?” Peter Whittle, leader of the Brexit Alliance, tweeted this week, suggesting that the press was unnecessarily and deliberately humanising the killer. Yet there’s a simple answer to this question: CPS and media regulators have established rules in place when it comes to releasing mugshots; Rudakubana’s became widely available following his guilty verdict.

With misinformation campaigns gathering steam online after the sentencing — in much of a similar vein to the conspiracies that fuelled the Southport riots in the wake of the girls’ killings last summer — we’re revisiting the established facts of the case, as well as the ways in which ideological arguments about the killer’s motivations have politicised an unthinkable tragedy.

What we know

On a bright summer’s day, a teenager takes a taxi to Hart Space, a dance studio in Southport. He wears a green hoodie, with a light-blue surgical mask pulled over his face. After leaving the taxi without paying, he crosses the pavement to the studio door and finds it locked. After a brief pause, he notices an opening to his right and steps on through. He climbs the stairs.

That’s where the CCTV footage ends. The rest of Axel Rudakubana’s story is reconstructed from police reports, witness statements, and court documents.

Upstairs at The Hart Space, young girls were sat making friendship bracelets or dancing to Taylor Swift. Leading the workshop, yoga instructor Leanne Lucas had just opened a window to let some air into the warm studio. She spotted Rudakubana below, but thought nothing of it.

Upon entering the room, Rudakubana drew a 20cm kitchen knife and grabbed the girl nearest to the door. He stabbed her. He moved so quickly, Ms Lucas did not know the severity of what was happening until she herself was stabbed. One of the child victims at first thought it must have been some kind of prank until she saw her own blood.

Heidi Liddle, another adult supervising the class, tried to rush the girls towards the door. She followed one girl who had fled to the toilet across the landing, shutting the door behind them and pressing herself against it. The door rattled — Rudakubana had pursued them. Then Ms Liddle heard screams — children who had not managed to escape.

All in all, Rudakubana’s attack lasted 15 minutes. Two girls lay dead and another dying. Eight more children and two adults had been severely injured. His rampage claimed the lives of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine.

When police raided Rudakubana’s home and searched his computer, they found several items that were both disturbing and relevant to the case. Some were images and videos of extreme violence – from torture, rape, and beheadings to genocides. (His parents, both Tutsi, had been forced to flee their home country of Rwanda after the outbreak of genocidal violence there by the Hutu-dominated regime.) One was a PDF file titled Military Studies in the Jihad against Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual. Another brought the search to an abrupt stop: a plastic tub containing a substance that turned out to be ricin. Reportedly, Rudakubana had purchased material to make enough ricin to kill 12,000 people.

In his sentencing remarks, judge Justice Goose said: "I am sure [had Rudakubana] been able to, he would have killed each and every child – all 26 of them." Rudakubana pled guilty, and was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years. “Many who have heard the evidence might describe what he did as evil,” said the judge. “Who could dispute it?"

Defending Rudakubana in court, Stan Reiz KC said he did not have a mental disorder that explained his actions. The barrister offered nothing in mediation for “such wickedness.”

The politicisation of a tragedy

Because narrative, like nature, abhors a vacuum, the story’s lacunae have attracted all kinds of theories. Since Rudakubana’s sentencing, theories have abounded across social media about who should be held accountable for the attack: Amazon for selling a teenager a knife? Prevent, the government’s counterterrorism strategy, for failing to act after Rudakubana was referred there three times? His schools? His family?

In a YouGov poll published on Friday, 91% of Britons said they found Rudakubana himself responsible for the Southport attacks; 72% pointed the finger at his parents; 70% said counter-terrorism services, 64% mental health services, 59% the police, 43% previous Tory governments, 43% his school, and 28% said the current Labour government.

What the poll didn’t include: the widespread theory among the far-right that it was the immigration process allowing Rudakubana’s parents to resettle in the UK that was to blame, because, as one person on X put it: “Integration doesn’t work when people are coming from violent nations”. Members of Patriotic Alternative, a far-right white nationalist group, stood outside the court on Thursday under a huge banner, reading: “STOP ANTI-WHITE VIOLENCE.”

Anti-immigrant and racist sentiment in regards to this case has run rife ever since the Southport riots, despite Rudakubana himself having been born in the UK. What the commentariat hasn’t made nearly so much noise about: the fact that Leanne Lucas, the dance class leader stabbed in the attack, said she believes the killer "targeted us because we were women and girls, vulnerable and easy prey".

For Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, “this barbaric and senseless act was clearly both political and ideological”. He thinks Rudakubana was motivated primarily by Islamist jihad and that the Director of Public Prosecutions at the CPS should resign in shame.

While admitting that Rudakubana may have intended to intimidate a section of the public, prosecutor Deanna Heer KC said during the trial that it was “not possible to identify any particular terrorist cause” for the stabbings. In his sentencing, the judge said Rudakubana’s actions did not meet the legal definition of terrorism, as there is no evidence he intended to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause.

Online commentators have pointed to the al-Qaeda manual as evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, their interlocutors counter with the fact that material mocking religions — including Islam — were found on Rudakubana’s devices. The truth is, neither category of item is proof of anything other than Rudakubana’s attraction to extreme or disturbing material and his intention to apply their practical lessons.

Last year, Justice Goose presided over another case of a Merseyside teenager with lethal intent. Jacob Graham, 20 years old at the time of sentencing, was jailed for 13 years for preparing acts of terrorism by compiling and sharing a bomb-making manual. As part of his scheme, by which he intended to kill at least 50 people, Graham downloaded a small library of publications including the Mujahideen Handbook and the White Resistance Manual. While Graham’s terrorist intent was much clearer than in Rudakubana’s case, there is no suggestion he subscribed to either Islamism or white supremacism. Accessing those documents was — for him — pragmatic, not ideological.

Making sense of the senseless

Rudakubana is also far from the first murderer or attempted murderer of children on Merseyside in recent years, or from the UK more generally. The killing of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in 2022 is still a fresh wound in local memory, as is the murder of Ava White, 12, in 2021. But the case perhaps most pertinent in respect to motivation may be the torture and killing of two-year-old Jamie Bulger in 1993. Apart from the appalling facts of the murder itself, the most upsetting aspect was that no coherent reason for Robert Thompson and John Venables’ actions was ever, or will ever, be established.

Thompson and Venables were 10 at the time of Bulger’s murder; Rudakubana was 17 when he stabbed Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King, and Alice da Silva Aguiar to death. He can be ascribed more agency and awareness than they could. His actions were also more premeditated, systematic and deadly. But whatever defect of reason or emotion that stimulated him was not recent. His fascination with violence led to his first of three referrals to Prevent, the government’s counterterrorism strategy, when he was only 13 years old. Like Venables, Rudakubana had a reputation for violence at school, with (as far as we know) no apparent causal environment such as an abusive or chaotic home life.

Many of the people condemning Rudakubana’s crimes on social media have taken to calling him an “it” rather than a “he” — it’s monstrous, evil, inhuman. It’s an understandable impulse when it comes to trying to make sense of a senseless act; no one wants to believe a person can be capable of something so unspeakably heinous. But extreme violence, no matter its motivations, is as old as humanity itself.

In ascribing reasons for Axel Rudakubana’s horrific murders, some commentators feel they are courageously uncovering a truth inconvenient for the media class or the political establishment. They may be failing to confront the most chilling possibility: that he stabbed and murdered little girls for no real reason at all.