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The father of the Southport killer has said his son “turned out to be a monster” as he tearfully expressed regret for failing to tell police about the teenager’s weapons or his attempted attack on his former school, days before he murdered three young girls.
Alphonse Rudakubana broke down in tears on the second day of his evidence to the Southport inquiry, saying he was “desperately sorry” to the parents of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine.
However, he was told the bereaved families had “complete disdain for your excuses” after testimony that sought to deflect some of the blame towards the agencies involved with the teenager.
Giving evidence at Liverpool town hall via video link, Rudakubana apologised for not having had the “courage” to tell police he had discovered his son Axel’s “small arsenal of weapons”, which included two machetes, a bow and arrow, firecrackers, a sledgehammer and crude attempts to make molotov cocktails and the deadly poison ricin.
A week before Axel Rudakubana’s knife rampage at a Taylor Swift workshop on 29 July last year, his father raced out of the house to stop him from getting into a taxi to go to his former school, where he had been planning to attack pupils.
Rudakubana said his son, then 17, had come into his bedroom holding a knife and demanding to be given another on the morning of 23 July 2024, the last day of term at Range high school in Formby, Merseyside, from where he had been permanently excluded five years earlier for carrying a knife and attacking a pupil.
The teenager then started to “lightly stab” the bed his father was lying on as he repeated his demands, Rudakubana told the inquiry on Thursday. “I believed he was trying to scare me into giving him the knife,” he said.
Axel had also been asking for petrol, the inquiry heard, and had a jerry can in the living room. Rudakubana said he believed his son was planning an arson attack on his former school.
Rudakubana said that after stopping his son from taking a taxi to the Range, Axel told him: “Next time if you stop me there will be consequences.”
Answering questions from Nicholas Moss KC, counsel to the inquiry, the father said the incident was “really frightening” and that he was ashamed he did not call the police.
Moss told the inquiry that Rudakubana messaged his wife, Laetitia Muzayire, later that day saying “our child needs to be protected” and that if he had gone to the Range “he could have been killed or in prison for life”.
Rudakubana, 50, denied he was discouraging Muzayire from calling the police, but admitted he had not wanted his son to be taken into care or jailed.
Moss told the inquiry that by this time Rudakubaba knew of his son’s “small arsenal of weapons”, had intervened in his attempt to attack his former school, been subject to escalating violence by the teenager at home, and was aware of the teenager’s history of carrying knives with intent to harm.
“The risk at this stage was painfully obvious,” Moss said of the days before the Southport attack.
Rudakubana had earlier admitted taking delivery of at least three knives for his son over the previous year. He claimed not to know that one of these was a machete despite the parcel being labelled “Mach Panther” and coming from Knife Warehouse.
Days before his son’s murderous attack, the 50-year-old took delivery of another package of knives, left them in the landing and went back to bed. By this time he had discovered the bow and arrow under the teenager’s bed as well as the jerry can and sledgehammer.
Asked by Moss if he had anything to say to the families of the girls murdered and harmed by his son, Rudakubana said: “My deepest sympathy, my condolences for the beautiful angels whose lives were taken by my son.
“I am so desperately sorry to them and everyone else who’s been harmed. I cry for them all the time … because we have a reminder of my son who turned out to be a monster.”
He said he had “lost the courage to save the little angels” and that he “could have done far more”. “The love I had for him overrode [my] good judgment,” he said.
