ON PAGE 394 of Volume Two of Sir Adrian Fulford’s report into the Southport child murders of July 2024 is a piece of information that has not been highlighted in the early media coverage.
Sir Adrian said of Axel Rudakubana’s parents: ‘Alphonse R and Laetitia M came to the United Kingdom from Rwanda in 2002 and were granted asylum in 2003. Initially they lived in Cardiff, where they both took degree courses.’
We therefore have it confirmed that Rudakubana did not come to Britain as an asylum seeker before he murdered Bebe King, six; Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; and Alice de Silva Agular, nine, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 2024.
His parents did.
It is not much of a surprise that it has taken more than 20 months for this information to come to light. We wouldn’t want to give encouragement to anyone who joined the anti-asylum protests after the murders, would we? We wouldn’t want the idea to get about that sometimes asylum seekers do not bring unmixed benefits to this country. And we wouldn’t want anyone thinking that Lucy Connolly, the one-time childminder jailed for two years and seven months for her unsavoury tweets in the wake of the murders, may not actually not have been entirely off the mark.
We have heard a lot about how Rudakubana’s parents are Christians and how there was no sign of terrorism in the killer’s background. However, Sir Adrian made a point in his long briefing on his report yesterday of mentioning an online video Rudakubana watched to give him encouragement before leaving home to carry out his slaughter.
This was material described by the BBC as ‘violent footage of the attempted murder of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel’. The attacker in Sydney in April 2024 was a 15-year-old described by police as a religious extremist, and who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he took a knife to Christians.
The parents are blamed by Sir Adrian for obstructing official efforts to cope with their murderous son and for failing to report his increasingly violent behaviour. One recommendation by the retired appeal judge suggests new laws to criminalise such behaviour.
Sir Adrian makes, as far as I have read, no mention of the possibility that public officials went easy on Rudakubana for race reasons. This, despite the concerns of Joanne Hodson, head of Acorns School and the only central figure praised in the Fulford report over the way her description of Rudakubana as ‘sinister’ was wiped away by other officials.
Race, then, nothing to do with the case. Only a cynic would think of the failure to act against Pakistani rape gangs and the failure of security guards to stop the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and see a pattern here.
Sir Adrian doesn’t seem to. Yesterday he referred to Rudakubana only as ‘AR’, nice cosy initials free from the foreign sound of his name.
There are more than 750 pages in the Fulford report and 67 recommendations, enough to make it impractical to assess it properly in less than a week. Journalists were given a couple of hours ‘lock-in’ to read it before they had to report it, far too little time even to read the main conclusions properly.
Their job is impossible. I remember and regret to this day attending the lock-in for the release of the Macpherson report into the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1999. Neither I nor my highly competent colleagues noticed in the available time Macpherson’s central and highly destructive recommendation: that in future any incident would be considered racist if just one person said so.
What does Sir Adrian suggest? Here is recommendation number five: ‘The Department for Transport should ensure that local authorities establish effective arrangements between licensed taxi companies and schools. These should enable school safeguarding teams to access taxi booking information where relevant to a legitimate safeguarding or risk concern relating to a child who should be at school.’
This is bureaucratic nonsense. Like the great bulk of Sir Adrian’s report, it is about process, agencies, meetings, records. And, naturally, Sir Adrian has begged us all not to blame any unfortunate individual who may have been involved in the endless tale of official neglect, incompetence and dodging of work and responsibility.
Judicial reports into child deaths and child murders always go the same way. Failures and missed opportunities are listed, earnest recommendations are made, no one is sacked except, on occasion, perhaps, a very junior social worker. We are all assured it will never happen again.
But it will.
