Last Monday (29), the city of Southport, on the northwest coast of England, was marked by a homicidal attack against children aged seven to 11 who were taking a dance class with songs by Taylor Swift.
Axel Rudakubana, 17, stabbed and killed six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elise Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar, the daughter of immigrants from the Madeira archipelago in Portugal. He injured 10 other people, eight of whom were also children (five were in serious condition).
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed shock and thanked emergency services for their swift response. He visited the scene to lay flowers. King Charles III and Queen Camilla expressed their condolences to the families. Singer Taylor Swift also expressed her condolences and fans raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the victims.
Rudakubana was born in the UK to immigrant parents from Rwanda. He arrived at the community centre where the class was being held at 11:45 local time, entered through the front door and began the attack. Local adults tried to protect the children, one was seriously injured, another hid a group of children in the bathroom. A third, an office worker in the same building, went to the scene after hearing the screams, tried to disarm the teenager and was stabbed in the leg.
Police were notified by telephone two minutes after Rudakubana arrived, and ambulances were called at 11:48. The first police officer to arrive waited for reinforcements, as he only had a truncheon to protect himself. When another police officer arrived, the two used taser (electroshock) against the suspect and arrested him.
The killer, who will be turning 18 days after the crime, was raised in a Christian home. Neighbors told British media that the Rudakubanas were very involved in the church. Axel has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, authorities said. His motive remains unclear, although local police have denied any connection to terrorist activities.
As a child, Rudakubana had aspirations of becoming an actor and appeared at the age of 11 in a BBC promotional video for underprivileged children, themed around the science fiction series Doctor Who. The video was deleted and the company responsible for managing him at the time deleted all content about his career on social media.
Anti-immigration activists create uproar
District Judge James Hatton, who convicted the young man of murder on August 1, decided to release Rudakubana’s name, even though he was a minor when he committed the crime, because it is an “exceptional situation” in which “the public interest is served by full transparency about the proceedings” of the case.
It is a reference to the situation created when anti-immigration activists spread false information about the crime: a false name and allegations about the nationality, religion and immigration status of the perpetrator of the attack were circulated.
The day after the crime, a group gathered around the nearest mosque and threw bricks, bottles and stones at it. The vandals also set fire to a police car, leaving 39 officers injured, 27 hospitalised and eight with more serious injuries. Similar protests spread to cities including Manchester, London, Sunderland, Liverpool, Nottingham and Hull. One of the protesters’ rallying cries was “stop the boats”, a reference to one of the ways illegal immigrants enter the country.
Police said many of those responsible for the riot were members of the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Islam political group founded in 2009 that failed to become a political party, is largely defunct but still has supporters.
Starmer called on police to “take action against extremists on our streets who are attacking police officers, disrupting local businesses and trying to sow hatred by intimidating communities”. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, promised more funding to defend mosques.
In total, more than 100 people were arrested. The protests spread as far as Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom). In the capital Belfast, cars and buildings were set on fire on Saturday night (3) after a group of protesters surrounded a Muslim community center.
Political commentators differ on who is responsible
“What is happening in the UK this week is frightening. It was also completely predictable,” British conservative writer and political commentator Douglas Murray said in X. “Indeed, some of us have been warning about this scenario for years. It was all avoidable. But all the warnings were ignored.”
For Murray, crime still has some connection to immigration. “Illegal mass migration turns societies with high levels of trust into societies with low levels. It turns coherent societies into incoherent ones. You can’t just deal with the retaliation against it. You have to deal with the cause. If our leaders don’t do that, it will get infinitely worse,” he said. He accused the two main parties in the UK, the Conservatives and Labour, of creating governments that accelerated mass migration, which would “become a powder keg” that “anything could explode”.
Alan Rusbridger, columnist for the newspaper The Independentblamed Elon Musk in his column. “If someone told Musk that he had any responsibility for these riots, he would laugh,” said the journalist, who was once editor-in-chief of the newspaper The Guardian.
“But it’s true,” Rusbridger said. “When Musk decided to spend $44 billion to buy what used to be called Twitter, he ultimately took responsibility for the expression of the platform’s 350 million users. (…) Now called X, the social network is where a deadly virus spread after the horrific stabbings of children in Southport. Musk empowered it.”
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