Burak Bir
23 January 2025•Update: 23 January 2025
LONDON
A UK court handed down a 52-year prison sentence Thursday to Axel Rudakubana for the murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last summer.
Rudakubana killed the children and attempted to murder 10 others in Southport, a coastal town in Merseyside, in July 2024.
Justice Julian Goose said Rudakubana was "determined to disrupt the proceedings" so he would not face the victims of his crimes and justice, in sentencing remarks at the Liverpool Crown Court.
"It is difficult to comprehend" why Rudakubana carried out such extreme violence, he said.
The judge said Rudakubana "planned to kill as many as he could," adding he "savagely killed" three of the children in more than 15 minutes.
He said a whole-life order, which is the harshest penalty that can be handed down in UK courts, cannot be given to Rudakubana because he was 17 when he committed the crime.
He stressed, however, that the murderer is likely to never be released.
The judge also said this was not terrorism but "that doesn't make it less terrifying."
Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, were murdered in the stabbing attack by the British citizen who was born in Cardiff, Wales.
'State agencies failed'
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch called for Rudakubana to never be released from prison, after the sentencing.
The government announced a national inquiry into the killings one day after the now-18-year-old Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the killings.
The perpetrator was in contact with a range of different state agencies throughout his teen years, including police, the courts, the Youth Justice system, social services and mental health services.
But Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said earlier this week that those agencies failed to identify the terrible risk and danger to others that he posed.
Far-right riots broke out across the UK following the stabbings in Southport on July 29.
The violence was fueled by false online claims that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker.
