Police studied 159,000 text messages to establish if killer's parents had fixation with violence

POLICE searched through close to 160,000 messages from the Southport killer's parents to see if they sympathised with his obsession with violence.

- By PATRICK EDRICH

The ongoing Southport Inquiry heard yesterday that a significant part of the police’s investigations into mass murderer Axel Rudakubana focused on his obsession with violent material and whether his parents shared his interest.

Detective chief inspector Jason Pye, who led the force’s probe, told the inquiry that the killer’s parents, Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire, “must have known” about his possession of weapons including machetes and knives, but nothing was found “to suggest at all that they sympathised with him”.

Rudakubana murdered Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, when he targeted a Taylor Swift-themed dance party on July 29 last year. He also badly injured eight other children, who cannot be named for legal reasons, plus teacher and party organiser Leanne Lucas and businessman John Hayes.

The Southport Inquiry has heard how Rudakubana, who is only being referred to as AR during proceedings, made more than a dozen online orders for weapons over at least two years.

Rudakubana's parents are believed to have been aware of what the orders were. On at least one occasion his father confiscated the package and hid it away.

Dating back to at least 2019, Rudakubana appeared to have an interest in knives. Apart from details about his online purchases, the inquiry has heard he told Childline he regularly carried them to school, took a knife into his former school, The Range, to carry out a revenge attack of someone he deemed to be a bully, and was caught on a bus by police officers with a stolen kitchen knife.