African teenager Axel Rudakubana’s Southport stabbing rampage that left three young girls dead could have been prevented by his immigrant parents and authorities, and a headteacher who warned he was “high risk” was accused of racial profiling, a national inquiry has found.
Inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford said in a damning report that the attack, which led to anti-immigration protests across Britain, “should have been prevented”, and that it was “highly likely” it would not have occurred if various agencies had dealt with Rudakubana’s deranged behaviour in the years prior.
Rudakubana was last year sentenced to at least 52 years’ imprisonment for fatally stabbing Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, and wounding eight more children and two adults at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in July 2024.
Sir Fulford criticised Rudakubana’s parents – Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire – for allowing knives and other weapons to be delivered to the family home and failing to set boundaries or report their concerns to authorities, but Merseyside Police confirmed neither will face criminal charges.
The inquiry heard that Joanne Hodson, headteacher of The Acorns School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, where Rudakubana was enrolled after being expelled from another school for taking a knife to class, emailed colleagues telling them then then-13-year-old needed to be regularly searched.
But when she flagged her concerns with the children’s mental health worker Samantha Steed, Ms Steed accused her of “racially stereotyping” Rudakubana as a “black boy with a knife”, which Ms Hodson told the inquiry “effectively shut me up”. She also described being met with “hostility” by the killer’s father.
In his report Sir Fulford wrote it was “unwise” of Ms Steed to “raise issues of racial stereotyping”, and that it “served to ‘close down’ Mrs Hodson”.
“Yet Mrs Hodson was raising a valid point about the need for a risk assessment. In those circumstances, Ms Steed should instead have sought to support
Mrs Hodson’s position.”
The headteacher also told the inquiry Rudakubana filled her with a “visceral sense of dread” and had a “sinister undertone”.
Earlier this year a separate inquiry into a deadly stabbing rampage carried out by a schizophrenic African immigrant Valdo Calocane in Nottingham in 2023 found that he was free to carry out his murderous attack because mental health workers feared detaining him would be racist.
Today’s Southport Report shows that state organisations missed multiple opportunities to stop Axel Rudakubana.
We remember the three young victims of this appalling, preventable attack: Bebe King (6), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), and Alice da Silva Aguiar (9). We will support the… pic.twitter.com/ztLUXOZATZ
— Chris Philp MP (@CPhilpOfficial) April 13, 2026
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp referred to both cases in Parliament on Tuesday, where he noted that Ms Hodson was “pressured by mental health services to water down the education, health and care plan to minimise the danger posed by Rudakubana because of his ethnicity”.
He quoted Ms Hodson’s testimony revealing that the wording of the education, health and care plan was “re-written in many places”, and told Parliament: “This contributed to the clear risks being missed.
“The Nottingham inquiry into the three tragic murders there identified exactly the same issue: mental health professionals in Nottingham decided not to section Valdo Calocane because they were concerned about an ‘over-representation of young black men in detention’.
“The fixation with ethnic disproportionality is deeply damaging. Ethnicity should never be a consideration: when an agency is taking steps to protect the public, everybody should simply be treated exactly the same. We cannot allow dangerous individuals to avoid detention for public safety simply because of their ethnicity.”
Mr Philp also criticised authorities for failing to provide information to the public after the attack, which he said created a “vacuum” that was “filled by untrue speculation online”.
Header image: Left, Axel Rudakubana (Merseyside Police). Right, Elsie Dot Stancombe (supplied).
The post Early warning about Southport killer dismissed as ‘racial profiling’ first appeared on The Noticer.
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