Sir Keir Starmer has described the Southport attack as a ‘devastating moment in our history’ and warned of a new type of terrorism threat from ‘loners’.
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference this morning, he said: ‘The blunt truth here is that this case is a sign Britain now faces a new threat. Terrorism has changed in the past.
‘The predominant threat was highly organized groups with clear political intent, groups like Al-Qaeda.
‘That threat, of course, remains, but now alongside that, we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.’
It comes after Axel Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and the attempted murder of eight other children as well as two adults – Leanne Lucas and Jonathan Hayes – yesterday afternoon.
Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were all killed in the knife attack at The Hart Space in the Merseyside town on July 29 last year.
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Concerns had been raised about Rudakubana’s violent behaviour at school, and he had been referred to counter-terror scheme Prevent three times since he was 13 – once over his interest in killing children in a school massacre.
But Prevent decided he had no terrorist motivations and posed no terrorist threat.
As a result, questions have been asked over whether the UK’s Prevent programme – designed to deradicalise those with terrorist sympathies – needs to adopt a new approach.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who attended Starmer’s speech this morning with Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, confirmed Rudakubana had been referred to Prevent three times between December 2019 and April 2021.
Yesterday evening she announced there would be a public inquiry into how the state failed to identify the risk posed by the Southport killer.
She said the country needed ‘independent answers’ on Prevent and other agencies’ contact with the ‘extremely violent’ Rudakubana and ‘how he came to be so dangerous’.
Starmer said the inquiry was needed to ‘answer all the questions the families, the people of Southport and the country have about this case and ensure no stone is unturned and every failure is exposed and dealt with.’
He later added that ‘versions’ of Southport-style violence had been seen ‘in America, with some of the mass shootings in schools’.
The PM continued: ‘It is not an isolated, ghastly example. It is, in my view, an example of a different kind of threat.
‘That is my concern, that is my thinking: that this is a new threat, individualised, extreme violence, obsessive, often following online viewing of material from all sorts of different sources.
‘It is not a one off. It is something that we all need to understand and have a shared undertaking to deal with within our society, and that is not just the laws on terrorism, the framework on terrorism, it’s also the laws on what we can access online.’
Yesterday, Rudakubana also pleaded guilty to manufacturing ricin and possessing a PDF of the Al-Qaeda training manual, a terrorism offence.
Reports have since emerged that he was planning an attack on his former school a week before he killed the three girls, but his father prevented him from getting into a taxi.
Cover-up accusations
Politicians including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have accused Sir Keir Starmer and his government of orchestrating a ‘cover-up’ by not making public all the information they had access to about the killer earlier.
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In his speech today, which was the first televised speech in the £80,000 media briefing room, the prime minister acknowledged he was told shocking details about the case soon after the suspect was identified.
But he said revealing what he knew ahead of the trial would risk its collapse through contempt of court, meaning ‘the vile individual who committed these crimes would have walked away a free man’.
Following Rudakubana’s surprise guilty plea yesterday, it was ‘now time for those questions’, he added.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch welcomed the announcement of a public inquiry, but said: ‘There remains serious questions about the transparency of government information at the time of the unrest that followed these horrific killings.’
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