Southport murder trial triggers soul-searching over UK approach to terror and justice

When teenager Axel Rudakubana went on a murderous rampage in the seaside town of Southport last July, he not only destroyed the lives of his victims and their families, but also shocked British society.

The 18-year-old received an A on Thursday 52 years imprisonment for killing three little girls and maiming 10 others, an atrocity that was followed by a wave of online misinformation and anti-immigration riots across England.

When the full details of Rudakubana’s disturbing story finally emerged this week, they sparked a heated debate over the UK’s approach to open justice, as well as the state’s understanding of modern terrorism.

Rudakubana was arrested at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at the scene of the murder last July, still standing over the child’s body with a kitchen knife in hand.

In the days and weeks that followed, police released few details, and misinformation began to spread online, including false claims that the attacker was an illegal immigrant.

Violent race riots followed, and the authorities were later accused of a cover-up, particularly by those on the right of British politics.

It is a claim that police, prosecutors and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, himself a senior barrister and former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, have repeatedly denied.

“If this trial had been thrown out because I or anyone else had disclosed crucial details while the police were investigating, while the case was being built, while we were awaiting a verdict, the vile individual who committed these crimes would have walked away a free man,” Starmer said on Tuesday the day

The position of Starmer and prosecutors is based on British contempt of court laws dating back to the early 1980s that limit what information can be released before a trial to prevent jurors from being impaneled.

However, barrister Jonathan Hall QC, who is currently reviewing terrorism legislation for the government, called the interpretation of state contempt law in the Southport case “overly cautious”.

Police, he told the Financial Times, could safely release Rudakubana’s age, ethnicity, nationality, his place of birth in Cardiff and the fact that he is of Rwandan Christian descent.

Naming him would have been more difficult because he was 17 at the time, but Hall said prosecutors could and should have sought a court order.

“Imagine if [police] made a clear, calm, authoritative, honest, transparent statement on Twitter [now X] early,” he said.

“Some are of course going to believe the worst or a conspiracy theory, but most people are just looking for information.”

The state’s silence could be ironically counterproductive at trial, Hall said, because jurors could instead have misinformation in their minds.

The justice system would do well to “clarify” its understanding of what “prejudicial” means in the age of social media, he said, while reviewing decades-old contempt of court laws.

The incident also sparked a debate about the country’s understanding of and response to terrorist attacks.

A few days after the Southport murders, police discovered Rudakubana was in possession of an al-Qaeda training manual.

Prosecutors would later allege this was used to plan the attack.He also prepared the deadly poison ricin in his bedroom before stashing it in a plastic box under his bed.

However, while he was accused of possessing terror-related material, he was not charged with committing an act of terrorism.Even the police working on the investigation said they initially struggled to understand why.

“I’m like, ‘Isn’t this terrorism now?’

A terrorism charge would also have made his investigation easier, he said.Under terrorism legislation, Rudakubana could have been detained for seven days.

Without it, police had a maximum of 72 hours to piece together their case and collect medical evidence on the 13 victims.

“It would absolutely mean we had time to do a lot more things,” Pai said of the terror charge.

Prosecutors said the sheer range of material found on Rudakubanan’s 43 devices, coupled with his lack of explanation for his actions in the interview, meant he could not be charged under the Terrorism Act 2000.

It defines terrorism as “in furtherance of a political, religious or ideological cause.” It was later updated to include racial ideology.

Among the more than 164,000 seized documents were violent material related to the Nazis, Gaza, Grozny and Iraq, as well as footage. attack on Bishop Marie Emmanuel in Australia last April.

“He wasn’t fighting for a purpose,” prosecutor Deanna Herr said Thursday. “His sole purpose was to kill.”

Starmer said this week that he understood “why people wonder what the word ‘terrorism’ means”.

“And so if the law needs to be changed to recognize this new and dangerous threat, then we will change it, and quickly,” he added.

However, Hall, who is currently reviewing the legislation under Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, said she was “sceptical” about expanding the definition of terrorism.

Casting a wider net, he said, could bring in individuals such as football hooligans or organized criminals.

Rudakubana’s case has also raised questions about how well Britain’s counter-extremism agencies are dealing with young people fixated on violence.

In 2022, at the age of 15, he told Lancashire police that he had thought about poisoning people and making poison for that purpose, which he later did. The force said it would not comment further ahead of the public inquiry.

Rudakubana also addressed the government’s Counter Extremism program three times between 2019 and 2021.

He was first referred at age 13 when his school noticed he was researching school shootings online.

He was subsequently flagged for posting on Instagram about former Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, while in April 2021 he was revealed to have sought out the 2017 London Bridge school attacks.

On each occasion, Prevent closed the case, stating that there was no coherent ideology behind his actions.

Speaking before the verdict, Vicky Evans, national counter-terrorism co-ordinator, said at the time of her referrals the program had not reached a new generation of extremists.

“Back then, the ‘Prevent’ partnership response to the growing fixation on extreme violence was evolving, but less developed than it is today,” he said.

“While improvements have been made to help overcome this challenge,” he added, “it is right to ask questions about what more needs to be done.”