Public Inquiry Opens Into Knife Attack That Killed Three Young Girls

The Phase 1 report of the Southport Public Inquiry is set to land at midday on April 13, 2026, at Liverpool Town Hall, less than two years after Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the seaside town of Southport, Merseyside. The report will be the most detailed public account yet of how Britain's safeguarding and counter-terrorism systems failed Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in the months and years before the July 29, 2024 attack.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time, stabbed the three girls to death at a children's dance and yoga club, injuring ten more children and leaving sixteen others with serious psychological damage. He pleaded guilty on January 20, 2025, to all 16 charges, including murder, attempted murder, production of the biological toxin ricin, and possession of a terrorist document. Mr Justice Goose sentenced him on January 23 to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 52 years, noting it was highly likely he would never be released.

The inquiry was formally established on April 7, 2025, after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned it following Rudakubana's conviction. Sir Adrian Fulford was appointed chair. Hearings opened at Liverpool Town Hall on July 8, 2025, and the substantive Phase 1 oral evidence ran for nine weeks, from September 8 to November 6, 2025. Over that period the inquiry received 25 impact statements and commemorative portraits and heard from more than 100 witnesses, 67 of whom gave live evidence.

Phase 1 carries two defined tasks: establishing a definitive chronological account of the attack itself, and reviewing how local services made decisions and shared information about Rudakubana in the years before he struck. That second task is where the most uncomfortable institutional reckoning lies. Schools referred Rudakubana to the government's Prevent counter-terrorism programme three times: first in December 2019, when he was 13, then twice more in February and April 2021. On each occasion, police closed his case without referring him to the Channel deradicalisation programme. A Prevent learning review found that practitioners rejected the referrals largely because Rudakubana did not fit the profile of someone with a clearly defined ideological narrative. The review concluded that the system was not equipped to deal with the kind of violence he went on to commit.

What Phase 1 cannot do is deliver criminal verdicts, assign civil liability, or determine personal culpability for individual officers or social workers. Those are matters for courts. What it can do is establish whether specific, identifiable moments existed at which the risk Rudakubana posed could have been managed differently, and which agencies bore responsibility for those decisions. Its terms of reference require it to examine his interactions with criminal justice, education, social care, and healthcare simultaneously, drawing Merseyside Police, NHS mental health services, local authority children's services, and schools into the same frame of scrutiny.

Phase 2, which will open after the Phase 1 report is assessed, widens the inquiry's scope beyond Southport entirely, examining systemic failure across England to identify and intervene with young people drawn toward extreme violence. Any recommendations that emerge will carry force for police forces, NHS trusts, and local authority children's services nationwide.

For the families of Bebe, Elsie, and Alice, tomorrow's report is not an endpoint. It is the formal record of what the state knew, what it did not act on, and what it must now be held to change.