Southport one year on

Importing people caught up in brutal genocides is dangerous and stupid.

It is one year since the Southport massacre, carried out by Alex Rudakubana. We still know very little about the teenager, whose parents came from Rwanda, even now. One year ago Rudakubana murdered Bebe King six, Elsie Dot Stancombe seven and Alice Dasilva Aguiar who was nine. The lives of the other girls who survived were forever changed. One girl who a Police Officer thought was dead when he arrived at the scene, was stabbed 30 times.

Today I re-run a post that I wrote after Rudakubana was sentences to 52 years for the knife attack on a room full of little girls.

“The simple joys of life can no longer be enjoyed because it feels like there is no point. We would do anything to hold Alice one more time.” These were a few words from the family of Alice da Silva Aguiar who was murdered by Alex Rudakubana in Southport last August.

At some point in the sentencing hearing of Alex Rudakubana yesterday, which took place at Liverpool Crown Court, I had to turn the radio off. Hearing about the injuries Rudakubana inflicted on those little girls and the living hell their parents now have to experience every single day, was too much. In the end Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years. He was told he would have received a whole life term but for the fact he was 17 at the time of the offence, committing it just a few days before his 18^th birthday.

We know a little more about Alex Rudakubana since August last year when we were ordered by Starmer not to dare speculate. We know that Rudakubana brought a knife to school 10 times and received a youth referral order. He was referred to Prevent three times but didn’t fill the criteria because he did not have a fixed ideology. “No action was taken because it was determined he had no obvious ideology or vulnerability to radicalisation and the service appeared to be unaware of his police history. Vicki Evans, Prevents national co-ordinator, said that government bodies “did not come together to effectively deal with the risk that he posed.”

There will now be a public inquiry and I hope we will find out more about why this appalling crime was committed. There will be calls for more laws: tighter terrorism legislation, tighter laws on purchasing knives online (the knife was bought on Amazon) and widening Prevent. There will be no debate on tightening the border.

Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash

In truth though, we know little of value and there is nothing to stop such an attack happening again. So what I am going to do is speculate and some of you might not like what I am about to say.

First, I am a cynical person with a very dim view of humanity and what people are capable of but most 18 year old men do not plan in detail how they will stab a room full of little girls and then carry out that attack. You could go into Feltham young offenders institution or even Wormwood scrubs and talk to the toughest, meanest criminal there and they would tell you they wouldn’t do this. And I’d believe them.

Stab a gang member on the other side? Sure. Stab someone who looked at them the wrong way – yes. But brutally attack a room full of little girls, no way. That’s beneath them. But this is what Rudakubana did. It was not a frenzied attack – he moved from girl to girl having stabbed them in their backs but it was vicious inflicting 122 injuries on one girl who died. He would have killed them all if he could.

Why? Why did he do this? And why after he had destroyed the lives of so many, was he ‘happy about it.’ Why was he happy that three little girls who he did not even know were dead?

We know very little about Rudakubana’s father and absolutely nothing about his mother. We don’t know how he was raised or what went on in the house. We do know that in 2002, Alex Rudakubana’s father Alphonse moved to the UK from Rwanda. In 2007 Alex Rudakubana was born in Cardiff. On what grounds did the father enter the UK? Did he claim asylum? We also know there was a genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

“The Rwanda genocide occurred over the course of some 100 days in April–July 1994. The genocide was conceived by extremist elements of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population who planned to kill the minority Tutsi population and anyone who opposed those genocidal intentions. It is estimated that some 200,000 Hutu, spurred on by propaganda from various media outlets, participated in the genocide. More than 800,000 civilians—primarily Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu—were killed during the campaign. As many as 2,000,000 Rwandans fled the country during or immediately after the genocide..

The methods for killing were typically quite brutal, with crude instruments often employed to pummel or hack away at victims. Machetes were commonly used. Rape was also used as a weapon and included the deliberate use of perpetrators infected with HIV/AIDS to carry out sexual assaults; as a result, many Tutsi women were intentionally infected with HIV/AIDS.”

As per Theodore Dalrymple, “As one of the most efficient genocides in history—that of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994—proved, genocide can be fun. People in Rwanda hunted and killed their neighbours and then spent the evenings celebrating, feasting, singing, and dancing. They were happy with their day’s work and couldn’t wait to resume it. In fact, it was the time of their lives.” City Journal

The genocide occurred in 1994 and Alphose Rudakuban arrived in the UK in 2002, only 8 years later. From the little footage we have of the father, who it has been reported stopped his son from carrying out a school massacre but didn’t report him to the police, I put him anywhere between 45 – 55 years of age. So what was Alphose Rudakubana doing during that genocide? What did he see? What happened to his extended family?

Alphose Rudakubana’s son grew up to watch ultra-violent videos on the internet, was obsessed with murder, beheadings and genocide. It is madness to continue importing people who have experienced brutal genocides and wars. Absolute madness. And of course the more barbaric the genocide the greater the claim for asylum becomes. The more traumatised the person, the greater the chance he has at gaining refugee in Britain and being settled in your local town or village. Madness.

You can bury millions of pounds on a public inquiry and tighten the terrorism legislation and purchasing knife legislation. But ultimately, and maybe this is where we like to fool ourselves, if someone wants to take a knife, a kitchen utensil that is in every kitchen in the country, and enter a place where there is a room full of defenceless girls, he can. As the devastated family of Elsie Dot Stancombe said in court, “You deliberately chose that place, fully aware that there would be no parents present, fully aware that those girls were vulnerable and unable to protect themselves.”

Sure you can make it difficult for the next man, turn the dance class into a prison, terrorise the law abiding but someone will always get through. Remember, we have to get lucky all the time, they only have to get lucky once.

If we are going to continue granting asylum and refugee status to people caught up in brutal genocides, I'd like to know if that is going to trigger any intergenerational trauma on their children. I’d like to know if any of these children, despite being born and bred in Britain, will go on to commit a crime like the Southport massacre.