The Southport Inquiry heard today how the Southport tragedy of 2024 was one of “unparalleled cruelty”, of which “nothing matching the extreme and very particular depravity” has occurred in modern-day UK.
Southport Inquiry Chair Sir Adrian Fulford says the killer “did not hesitate” during the attack, and was “fully aware” that those attending the dance event that day would be very young girls.
Sir Adrian says it is “fundamental” to understand that the killer “was not suffering from any kind of mental illness” when he carried out his murders.
He says the killer spent the majority of his waking hours online watching “deeply inappropriate and disturbing subjects”, during which time he was “wholly unsupervised and lacking any parental controls”.
It was known that the murderer “was potentially highly dangerous”, and Sior Adrian notes that his parents and multiple officials knew this from various incidents.
He said that he has “no doubt” that if the right procedures were in place and the right steps were taken “this dreadful event would not have happened”.
“It could have been and it should have been prevented”, he says.
The Chair says the killer had become an aggressive recluse who “bullied and threatened his family” while lying to officials.
He had researched and purchased a “wide range” of weapons which were delivered to the family home, as well as ingredients to make ricin – a “highly lethal poison”.
Against this “truly worrying background”, Sir Adrian says, it should be remembered that, for over two years before the attack, the offender had only left home by himself “when he was intending to kill or seriously harm others”.
He adds that the risks had been clearly signposted over many years, and the sheer number of missed opportunities for intervention is “striking”.
No organisation “sufficiently accepted ownership of, or overall responsibility for” the risk posed by the killer, he says.
Having multiple agencies involved served to “deter any one of them from undertaking a meaningful risk assessment” or from co-ordinating a “proper response”.
There was a “widespread but false” assumption that this duty rested with some other organisation when, in actual fact, nobody was taking this role on.
As a result, the attacker “fell through the cracks”.
Sir Adrian declared that “Such a failure must not be allowed to happen again.”
He said he is “particularly concerned” that the killer wasn’t arrested in October 2019, despite the fact he’d taken a knife into school at least 10 times with the intention of harming pupils.
“There was a failure to strike the right balance between handling the clear risk AR posed to others and the need to avoid criminalising children”, he says.
The killer was referred to Prevent three times by The Acorns School, in December 2019 and February and April 2021. Sir Adrian says there were failures from the school and Counter Terrorism police in obtaining the necessary information for the first referral.
It “was simply the wrong decision” to reject him for further action under the Prevent scheme, he says.
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