A former judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has been appointed to head a statutory inquiry into the July 2024 murders of three young girls in Southport, the British government has announced.
Retired judge Adrian Fulford, who has presided over some of the UK’s most notorious criminal cases of recent years, will head the inquiry into the murders by Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of immigrants from Rwanda.
Rudakubana was 17 when he stabbed to death six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar at a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class in the town, an hour north of Liverpool. He has been sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison for the killings, which lit the fuse on public disorder that culminated in a week of rioting across Britain last summer.
British home secretary Yvette Cooper said on Monday the two-pronged inquiry would focus on the events of the day and their lead-up, as well as the wider issue of how children and young people are “drawn into extreme violence”. Rudakubana had shown a fascination with violence going back several years before the attacks and had been on the radar of British anti-terrorist officers.
Where Ukrainian children once played, piles of toys memorialise the dead
‘They want revenge’: Spanish government accused of playing politics with Franco’s bitterly divisive legacy
How did the Atlantic editor get added to the White House Signal group chat?
Eyewitnesses recount deadly Israeli attack on medics in Gaza
The home office said the inquiry would include Rudakubana’s “history and interactions with various public bodies including criminal justice, education, social care, and healthcare, as well as decision-making and information-sharing by local services and agencies”.
It emerged after the Southport killings that he had been referred three times to the Prevent anti-extremism programme, which is meant to identify radicalised people capable of committing attacks. British prime minister Keir Starmer said failings in the Southport case “leapt off the page” at him.
“The Southport inquiry will provide insights into any failings that allowed a young man with a previous history of violence to commit this horrendous attack,” said Ms Cooper.
“The brutal murder of [the] three young girls – Bebe, Elsie and Alice – in Southport was an unimaginable tragedy. We owe it to their families and all those affected on that terrible day to quickly understand what went wrong, answer difficult questions and do everything in our power to prevent something like this from happening again,” she said.
Mr Fulford was appointed as chairman of the inquiry following consultation with the victims’ families and will meet them as his “first priority”, said the home office. The families had lobbied the British government to grant the inquiry full statutory powers to compel witnesses to give evidence.
Mr Fulford is seen as one of the most pre-eminent lawyers in Britain operating in the criminal legal sphere. He became a barrister 46 years ago and was later appointed a judge, retiring as the UK’s Lord Justice of Appeal in 2022. He was previously a judge at the International Criminal Court for a decade until 2012.
Among the high-profile cases he has handled was the sentencing of former police officer Wayne Couzens for murdering Sarah Everard. Couzens kidnapped her from near Clapham Common in south London during a period of Covid pandemic restrictions, before raping and killing her. The judge handed Couzens a whole-of-life prison term in 2021.
He also presided over the criminal trial of men convicted for the 7/7 bombings on London’s Tube and bus network in 2005. Mr Fulford also presided over the trial of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese war criminal who was the first person tried at the ICC.
