The murderer of 3 girls heavily sentenced

Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old young man who stabbed three girls to death in July in England, was sentenced Thursday to a minimum sentence of 52 years in prison for this attack which shocked the country and sparked violent riots in the summer last.

“It is very likely that he will never be released,” Judge Julian Goose said as he delivered his verdict at Liverpool Crown Court.

Throughout the hearing on Thursday, chilling details of the murders of Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva, 9, on July 29, 2024, were revealed.

They were chased and stabbed at a dance class inspired by star Taylor Swift in Southport, an attack that sparked days of anti-immigration riots in dozens of towns.

Axel Rudakubana, who was 17 years old at the time of the events, showed “such extreme violence” that it is “difficult to understand” the attack, the judge said.

Bebe King’s body bore more than 120 knife marks. Eight other children and two adults were injured.

“If he could, he would have killed every child, as well as every adult in his path,” added the magistrate.

Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty on Monday, cutting short the trial, initially scheduled to last four weeks. He could not be sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment because of his age at the time of the attack.

He gave no explanation for his actions.

On Thursday, he had to be taken out of the dock twice because of his behavior. “I feel very bad, I have to see a doctor,” he shouted, saying he had not eaten for 10 days.

Relatives of the victims were in tears in court where the prosecutor gave the horrifying account of the attack.

“The little girl of our dreams was taken from us in such a horrible and unfair way that it completely broke us,” Alexandra and Sergio Aguiar, Alice’s parents, said in a statement read in court.

This attack was “premeditated and planned,” said prosecutor Deanna Heer, describing victims attacked from the back and stabbed multiple times, in a rampage of violence.

In police custody, Axel Rudakubana said he was “very happy” that these children were dead, she added.

In tears and shocked by the murderer’s agitation at the hearing, some of the families left the room when the description of the injuries began.

Those inflicted on two of the deceased girls were “particularly atrocious”, reflecting the “sadism” of the assailant, the prosecutor stressed.

Videos from surveillance cameras showed children fleeing the chaos of the dance hall screaming, or a little girl, crying silently, being rescued in the toilet by a police officer.

“There is nothing that associates him with a political or religious ideology (…) His only objective was to kill,” declared Deanna Heer, in reference to the absence of “terrorist” qualification for these murders.

The police found in his home a machete, arrows, an Al-Qaeda manual in which he learned to make a poison, ricin, and numerous images of torture, decapitation or rape.

He was “fascinated by extreme violence”, and had, among other things, documents on the genocide in Rwanda, the country where his family came from.

“None of us will ever be able to answer this terrible question: (…) Why did he do that? Why wasn’t this stopped?” asked Andrew Brown, founder of the residents’ group Stand up for Southport.

Axel Rudakubana was born in 2006 in Wales, into a Christian family originally from Rwanda.

Diagnosed with autism, he was excluded from his college after bringing a knife there at the age of 13, but returned to attack his former classmates, whom he accused of racist harassment, with a hockey stick.

Many opportunities were missed to stop him: he had been reported three times to an extremism prevention program, notably for having learned about the killings in American schools during computer science class.

The attack sparked a wave of anti-immigration and Islamophobic riots in dozens of towns in England and Northern Ireland, after far-right accounts spread rumors online about the identity of the suspect.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Thursday that he “stands with” the families of the victims. He called the attack “one of the most painful moments in the country’s history.”

The head of government addressed “the survivors, the families and the population of Southport”. “You are not alone. We stand with you in mourning,” he said in a statement.