UK Counter-Extremism Measures to Be Reviewed After Southport Murders
The murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, and misinformation on social media about the attacker, triggered riots last summer.
The murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, and misinformation on social media about the attacker, triggered riots last summer.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Tuesday the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport by a teenager who had been referred to the government’s anti-extremism program three times, must lead to “fundamental change” in how the British state protects its citizens.
His comments followed the announcement on Monday of a public inquiry into the incident, which sparked riots across the country.
Axel Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, pleaded guilty to all 16 charges, including the three murders, on the first day of his trial at Liverpool Crown Court on Monday.
Starmer, who became prime minister only three weeks before the attacks, said, “The tragedy of the Southport killings must be a line in the sand for Britain.”
The murders in Southport, a seaside town in the northwest of England in July 2024, triggered public protests about immigration, which in some places turned into riots.
Rudakubana was the British-born son of a couple who had moved to the UK from Rwanda after the infamous 1994 genocide, but in the hours after the murders, information spread online which claimed the suspect was an illegal immigrant who had arrived in the UK on a small boat.
Three months after the murders it emerged Rudakubana had also been charged with terrorist offenses.
This week it emerged Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times.
Prevent is the UK government’s program, introduced in 2003, designed to divert people, especially teenagers and other young people, away from Islamic and other forms of extremism. Farage ‘Right All Along’ The leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, said on Monday he had been “right all along” when he claimed in the summer information had been withheld from the public.
But Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said certain information had been withheld, “in line with the normal rules of the British justice system.”
In Britain there are strict rules, known as contempt of court, preventing details about an individual going into the public domain prior to their trial, but Rudakubana’s unexpected guilty pleas meant information about him can be revealed for the first time.
An undated custody image of Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls in Southport, England, on July 29, 2024. Merseyside Police/PA
On Monday evening Cooper announced a public inquiry and said the country needed “independent answers” on why the police and other agencies who had contact with Rudakubana did not prevent his attacks.
As well as the murders, Rudakubana admitted 10 counts of attempted murder, possession of a knife, production of a biological toxin, ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit acts of terrorism.The terrorism offense relates to a PDF file entitled “Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual.”
Rudakubana was referred three times to Prevent when he was 13 and 14, and was in contact with several state agencies, but they apparently failed to spot the threat he posed.On Tuesday, in a televised speech, Starmer said there were “tough questions” to answer about how the authorities failed to protect the people of Southport.
“We must ... ask and answer difficult questions, questions that should be far-reaching, unburdened by cultural or institutional sensitivities and driven only by the pursuit of justice,” he added.
Starmer said the case showed “terrorism has changed” and the law might need to be altered to deal with “a new threat … acts of extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms.”
“It is a new threat, it’s not what we would have usually thought of as terrorism when definitions were drawn up when guidelines were put in place, when the framework was put in place and we have to recognize that here today,” he said.
Handout photo of Alice da Silva Aguiar, one of three girls murdered by Axel Rudakubana at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, on July 29, 2024. Merseyside Police/PA Wire
‘Risk’ of Trial Collapsing Critics, including Farage, have accused Starmer’s government of withholding information about Rudakubana, but he said there had been no conspiracy of silence, just a desire to see justice done.
He said, “The only losers if the details had been disclosed would have been the victims and the families because it ran the risk the trial would have collapsed.”
Starmer is a former lawyer and director of public prosecutions, who led the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales between 2008 and 2013.
A week before the girls were killed, Rudakubana tried to take a taxi to his former school, where he had been bullied. His father prevented him, apparently worried there might be an altercation.
Rudakubana will be sentenced on Thursday and faces a mandatory life sentence. The circumstances of his crime would have usually meant he would have got a whole life tariff, meaning he would never be released.
But because of his age at the time of the offense, he cannot be given a whole life term, which means he could potentially be released in 40 or 50 years.
The Associated Press and PA Media contributed to this report.
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The X Games will experiment judging halfpipe runs this week in Aspen using artificial intelligence, the cutting-edge technology that could someday play a role in the way subjectively judged sports are scored.
Long a trendsetter in action sports, the X Games and its new CEO, freestyle skiing great Jeremy Bloom, teamed with Google founder Sergey Brin to build the technology.
Using Google Cloud tools including Vertex AI, Bloom thinks this experiment has potential to change the game on halfpipes, then maybe on slopestyle courses, skating rinks and anywhere a judge is used to score a contest.
“Part of subjective sports, we see it all over the place, is that even at their best, humans can get it wrong,” said Bloom, who was a freestyle skier at two Olympics while also playing college football at Colorado. “Sometimes getting it wrong has huge implications. What if we could give judges superpowers and they could see things they couldn't see with the human eye, and this technology could help inform them?”
The specter of a judging mistake lingers over every high-stakes contest, and even with its more laid-back vibe, snowboarding, which is now a fixture in the Olympic program, is no exception.
At the last Winter Games in Beijing, the sport narrowly avoided a potential scandal in the men's halfpipe final. Japan's Ayumu Hirano landed the most difficult trick in the sport — a triple cork — as part of a strong, top-to-bottom run, but was ranked behind another rider who didn't do the trick after two rounds.
Snowboarding experts were aghast on social media. Had Hirano not pulled off the trick again on his third round, his score from Round 2 wouldn't have been enough for the gold medal he eventually won.
In another episode, Canadian slopestyler Max Parrot acknowledged not grabbing his board on a run that earned him a gold medal, a key element that judges missed but that could be picked up on close review of the video.
The AI at the X Games this week won't have any impact on the official scoring, but will be a gauge of what's possible in the future. Bloom said thousands of hours of halfpipe footage, along with the judging criteria, have been loaded into a system that will be shown on the TV telecast and be made available to the live judges.
The AI will be programmed to watch haflpipe practice and predict the top three finishers. Then its powers will be used to judge and commentate on three different riders as they go down the halfpipe.
“It's early days, but the technology sort of blows your mind,” Bloom said. “It's the power of what it can do when you give it clear direction. It's pretty amazing what this thing can do.”
In snowboarding, judges look at elements like the height of the jumps, the difficulty of the tricks and how well they're executed. They ultimately deliver scores on a 100-point scale based on how runs stack up against each other.
It's a nuance unlike figure skating or gymnastics, where individual tricks have specific point values. Bloom says all that is being taken into account as they work through the experiment.
He does not envision a future with no human judges.
“I don't think this replaces the judges, Bloom said, but I think it gives them power to ensure objectivity.”
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