Southport killer admitted carrying a knife 10 times

Southport killer Axel Rudakubana admitted carrying a knife on 10 separate occasions but was still able to buy a blade on Amazon, the home secretary has said.

Yvette Cooper said several agencies failed to identify the danger posed by the teenager as he developed an obsession with extreme violence in the years before the attack.

On Monday, Rudakubana pleaded guilty to killing Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, last July. He will be sentenced on Thursday.

Earlier, the prime minister warned of a "new and dangerous threat" from violence-obsessed individuals, which followed the announcement of a public inquiry into missed opportunities to stop Rudakubana.

Cooper told the Commons it was a "total disgrace" that he was able to "easily able to order a knife on Amazon" at the age of 17 despite having a prior conviction for a violent offence against another child at school.

It has also emerged that Rudakubana had been referred to the anti-extremism programme Prevent on three separate occasions between 2019 and 2021.

A review of the programme over the summer found Prevent failed to flag Rudakubana as a serious threat because he did not exhibit a commitment to a single radical ideology, Cooper told the Commons.

"Too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology," she said, in light of Rudakubana's interest in extreme violence.

Cooper said it was "unbearable to think that something more could and should have been done" to stop him, and that "action against him was much too weak".

The home secretary said a public inquiry would be given all the powers it needed to assess whether red flags were missed. Areas of interest are likely to include:

• The five occasions Lancashire Constabulary officers responded to calls from Rudakubana's home address between October 2019 and May 2022, relating to concerns about his behaviour
• Repeated referrals to safeguarding services, children's social care and adolescent mental health services
• A referral to the youth offending team after Rudakubana's conviction for a violent offence
• Concerns passed on to the local authority by Childline following calls by Rudakubana as a teen, including one where he disclosed he planned to take a knife to school because of racial bullying

Speaking in Downing Street earlier on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer said failings by public bodies in the lead-up to the Southport murders "leap off the page" and that it was "clearly wrong" Rudakubana was deemed not to meet the threshold for intervention from the Prevent programme.

The circumstances around Rudakubana's offending have led to wider scrutiny over what the government has described as an increasing threat from young people with an interest in extreme violence.

Cooper told the Commons that 162 people were referred to Prevent last year over concerns related to school massacres, amid what she described as a "wider challenge of rising youth violence and extremism".

The number of children investigated for involvement with terrorism has increased threefold in three years, she added.

The government said tech companies must remove the type of extreme material Rudakubana had accessed online.

They "should not be profiting" from hosting content that "puts children's lives at risk", Cooper said.