How the Southport terror charge is undermining trust in the police

In the hours following the attack, a flood of misinformation spread online which in turn sparked violent disorder and suspicion

On July 29, three girls went to a Taylor Swift party at a studio in Southport, Merseyside and did not return. It was meant to be a treat for the summer holidays: two hours of yoga and dancing along to some of their favourite music. Instead, they were stabbed to death, during a frenzied knife attack in the rooms where they had been playing. Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, died at the scene. Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, died in hospital the following day. Eight other children were injured in the attack, as well as two teachers.
The hours and days that followed were a chaotic nightmare of misinformation, violence and conspiracy. On the night of the attack, Merseyside Police reported that a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who had been born in Cardiff, had been arrested on suspicion of murder. They said that the attack was not believed to be terror-related. The suspect was later identified as Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the child of Rwandan parents who moved to the Southport area in 2013.
He was charged with three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and possession of a knife.
Three months later, on Oct 29, authorities announced that Rudakubana was being charged with two further charges, following a search of his home: “Production of a biological toxin, namely ricin, contrary to Section 1 of the Biological Weapons Act 1974,” and “possessing information, namely a PDF file entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, contrary to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000.”
Although he has been charged with a terror offence, July 29 is not being treated as a terrorist attack. As soon as news of the charges came through, there were accusations of a cover-up.
“Who could possibly have predicted that the ‘mainstream’ official sources/media were lying as usual about crime, terrorism, Islam,” said former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings, on X.
Serena Kennedy, Merseyside’s chief constable, said: “At this time, Counter Terrorism Policing has not declared the events of 29 July a terrorist incident.
“I recognise that the new charges may lead to speculation. The matter for which Axel Rudakubana has been charged under the Terrorism Act doesn’t require motive to be established.
“For a matter to be declared a terrorist incident, motivation would need to be established.”
It follows the case of Valdo Calocane, who fatally stabbed three people and injured three more in Nottingham in June 2023. As Tim Jacques, the then-senior national coordinator of counter-terrorism policing, told The Telegraph in August 2024: “In every shape and form, it looked like a terrorist attack.” But it was not. Police found no proof of ideological, racial, religious or political cause, which is the threshold for terror charges. Calocane was a paranoid schizophrenic.
Such stories highlight the grave challenges facing police forces in the social media era. False information, to suit one narrative or another, runs faster than facts. The English criminal justice system has vital checks and safeguards to protect the innocent until they are proven guilty. But these can feel sluggish in an era when false information can be distributed to millions of people online in seconds. An online mob is quick to misread due process as conspiracy.
The difficulties began as soon as the awful details of the attack started to emerge. The police were not legally at liberty to name Rudakubana. However, this scarcity of official information created a fertile environment in which falsehoods about the case could spread quickly on social media. Eddie Murray, a local parent, published a post on LinkedIn. “My two youngest children went to holiday club in Southport for a day of fun only for a migrant to enter and murder/fatally wound young children,” he wrote. It was the first mention of “migrant” in connection with the case. The BBC reported that Murray’s family had in fact been turned away from the dance class that day because it was full. He later told the corporation that he was only posting the information he had been given.
Although the post was taken down shortly afterwards, it was not before it had been copied and reshared by people including Paul Golding, the co-founder of the far-Right group Britain First. According to the BBC, Murray’s post had been seen more than two million times within hours.
Another account claimed that the suspect was “Ali Al-Shakati”, who had arrived on a small boat in 2023 and was known to MI6. The Right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who has more than 10 million followers on X, claimed the attacker was an “illegal immigrant” and that people needed to “wake up”. Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), co-founder of the far-Right English Defence League (EDL), shared a post which he said suggested the authorities were trying to “manipulate” the public. Laurence Fox weighed in with his own comments, too.
The truth or otherwise of these statements was irrelevant. (This week, Yaxley-Lennon was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court, for repeating false claims about a Syrian refugee.) Such inflammatory comments only fuelled the mob.
In an attempt to combat the misinformation being spread online, at noon the following day on July 30, Merseyside Police issued another statement: “A name has been shared on social media in connection with the suspect in the incident in Southport,” they said. “This name is incorrect and we would urge people not to speculate on details of the incident while the investigation is ongoing.”
Without concrete information, however, the statement did little to stop the flow of speculative information online, or the emotive response to it. Around 5.30pm, Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, posted a video in which he wondered “whether the truth is being withheld from us”. (Minutes after the charges were announced on Oct 29, Farage posted a sceptical video, adding: “perhaps I was right all along.”)
Later that evening, an angry mob targeted a mosque in Southport, hurling bricks at it and reportedly chanting anti-Islamic chants. Further violence followed. More rioting was reported the following day across England and Northern Ireland.
“It shows that you only need a little bit of misinformation for online falsehoods to turn into offline violence,” says Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge. “It’s scary to think about how easy it was for some relatively obscure accounts to start spreading a false message that plays into a narrative that people want to be true. It confirms people’s biases. We know that in those situations, people are less likely to scrutinise information.”
By Aug 1, a judge had permitted Rudakubana’s name to be published. Lifting the anonymity and remanding Rudakubana in youth detention, Judge Andrew Menary KC said the “idiotic rioting” was part of the reason it was in the public interest for the name to be reported. Maintaining the suspect’s anonymity, he added, risked “allowing others who are up to mischief to continue to spread misinformation in a vacuum”. As Rudakubana was due to turn 18 the following week on Aug 7, the reporting restrictions would have expired anyway.
“The police were in a difficult position and I thought they handled it in a rather straightforward and credible way,” says Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University. “They got [a statement] out quickly. You could see they were trying to get a handle on the situation and be as clear as they could without breaching the regulations. But you could see the kind of agony they felt because they could see how incendiary this could become.”
Last week, an Ofcom report found a “clear connection” between social media posts and the violent disorder that followed. In an open letter, the Ofcom chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, wrote: “Posts about the Southport incident and subsequent events from high-profile accounts reached millions of users, demonstrating the role that virality and algorithmic recommendations can play in driving divisive narratives in a crisis period.” So far, since July 29, police have made a total of 1,590 arrests and brought a total number of 1,015 charges, according to the National Police Chief’s Council. More than 200 people have been sentenced, most of them jailed, with an average term of two years.
A fierce debate has ensued over whether some terms were disproportionate, fuelled by the recent death of Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old grandfather who is believed to have taken his own life in prison 10 days ago while serving a sentence of two years and eight months for violent disorder.
“It’s clear that it’s an incredibly difficult context for the police to handle,” Chadwick adds. “I think we are heading towards a new kind of settlement where the police are perhaps more confident in pursuing these kinds of cases.” Part of the problem, he adds, is that social media sites increasingly incentivise users to prioritise clicks and eyeball time, even at the expense of accuracy. In particular, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, the platform he rebranded as X, he has pursued a vigorously pro-free speech agenda, as well as bringing in an ad-share model, where users can be paid for generating engagement.
“That kind of environment is going to make it difficult for police to judge how things are going to unfold,” Chadwick says. “Because people are incentivised not just to be part of it, for the buzz, but also to earn revenue. I think there has to be a greater sense of responsibility.”
The Southport case continues. Some on the Right may claim to be vindicated by the nature of the charges, even though the police have not so far declared the killings as a terrorist incident. It will come as no comfort to the victims of the thuggery and rioting that followed the stabbings. Or for the families and friends of Bebe, Elsie and Alice.