The father of Axel Rudakubana has told the inquiry into the 2024 Southport attack that his failure to deal with his son’s violent behaviour had “catastrophic consequences, for which I am desperately sorry”.
Alphonse Rudakubana said he was “very scared” of his son and avoided confrontation with him, which meant he did not oversee the teenager’s internet activity. His son was regularly searching online for violent material and went on to order a stockpile of weapons.
“The combination of fear and the desire to avoid confrontation by not inquiring into his activities and accepting his punishments undoubtedly prevented me from doing things that would be expected of a parent, such as to monitor his internet activity,” he said in a written statement. “This had catastrophic consequences for which I am desperately sorry.”
Giving evidence to the inquiry at Liverpool town hall via video link on Wednesday, Alphonse Rudakubana said he accepted his “share of the responsibility” for his son’s actions, which saw three young girls stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift holiday club.
Alphonse Rudakubana also repeatedly criticised other agencies at the hearing, accusing teachers of unfairly singling out Axel Rudakubana for punishment and of making “malicious” referrals to the Prevent counter-terrorism scheme, describing one school as “like a prison”.
The inquiry also heard that Alex Rudakubana’s parents and older brother found knife packaging minutes after the then 17-year-old left home to carry out the attack – the first time he had left the house alone in more than two years – however, they failed to call the police.
Days earlier, Alphonse Rudakubana had stopped his son from returning to his former school where he is thought to have been planning to attack pupils against whom he held a “dangerous grudge”.
Axel Rudakubana’s brother, Dion Rudakubana, said he was “surprised” when his younger brother left the house alone on the morning of 29 July last year and initially feared he may be planning to attack someone.
However, he said this worry was “quite quickly subdued” by his parents, who thought he had just gone for a walk: “The sentiment was that this was a positive step – this was him combatting a fear.”
Dion Rudakubana said his mother went back to bed to recover from a night shift despite finding the opened knife packaging and Axel Rudakubana’s unexplained trip out of the house.
Axel Rudakubana had by this time been excluded from school for carrying a knife, and two years earlier he told police he intended to stab someone when he was caught with a blade on a bus. His family had been hiding their kitchen knives since 2019, the inquiry heard.
Dion Rudakubana said he believed his brother had not left the house alone since 17 March 2022, when he was reported missing by his parents and found by police officers carrying a knife on a bus. Alex Rudakubana told officers at the scene that he intended to murder someone so that he could delete his social media profiles.
In sometimes combative evidence to the public inquiry, Alphonse Rudakubana denied “scrabbling around for any possible excuse for [his] son’s criminal behaviour”. He accused teachers at Range high school of unfairly singling him out, before he was permanently excluded for attacking a pupil and carrying knives in October 2019.
By early 2024, Alphonse Rudakubana said his son’s behaviour at home had become “very frightening”. He recalled one incident in which the teenager poured oil over his father’s head and threatened to murder him if he had him removed from home, telling him: “It may take a day, it may take a week, it may take a month [but] trust me, I will kill you.”
He told the inquiry: “I had lost control of [Axel]. I had no authority over him as a father. He was questioning everything about me – the way I speak, why am I at home, my mother should be at home, I should be working.
“I was reduced to – he was calling me Alphonse because I didn’t deserve ‘dad’ – somebody who feed him and do all he ask. I had no power at all to stop him from accessing anything he wanted to look at online.”
He said nobody knew the teenager was viewing extreme violence, antisemitic material, anti-Islamic and sexist images: “There was another side to him that I didn’t know.”
Earlier, Dion Rudakubana said he did not know why his brother targeted young girls but that it may be “because children are very valuable to society, in that they are society’s future and it would hurt society particular badly if children were to be harmed. I think it would be something along those lines but I say this in retrospect.”
Detectives have never established a clear motive for why the teenager murdered three young girls and stabbed 10 others at a summer holiday club, and they have consistently ruled out terrorism.
Dion Rudakubana said his younger brother had amassed a large number of parcels in the living room, which neither he nor his parents were allowed to touch.
In written evidence, he said he was “worried the parcels had something bad in them” and told the inquiry that he suspected it could be a weapon or “certainly something dangerous”.
However, he said this fear was “never sufficiently dominant for me to go and say something”.
Asked by Richard Boyle, counsel to the inquiry, whether it was “very dangerous” if the troubled teenager had access to weapons given his history of violence, Dion Rudakubana said: “Yes [but] I didn’t think there was an imminent threat for my life as a result of these boxes.”
Boyle asked whether he thought about the threat to others. Dion Rudakubana replied: “No, I didn’t consider that, considering how isolated these instances were [of Axel Rudakubana being violent to others].
“I didn’t associate any risk of harm with anyone outside the home. It’s within the home [that] it was apparent on a daily basis.”
Dion Rudakubana said he had returned from university on 26 July, three days before the attack, when his father made a “vague” reference to his brother having “done something bad” days earlier.
Dion Rudakubana said he only later learned that this related to his younger brother being stopped by his father from getting into a taxi when he is believed to have been planning to attack pupils at Range high school in Formby, from where he was excluded in 2019.
In his written statement, Dion Rudakubana said his father seemed “afraid” of the 17-year-old in the days before the attack, “which was unusual”.
He messaged a friend on 26 July to say that his father had told him: “Your brother is dangerous, he can kill you.” He told the inquiry: “I don’t think he directly said ‘He can kill you’ but rather indicated that there was a threat to life, and I felt that.”
The inquiry continues.
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