Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is demanding that Elon Musk’s X platform remove a violent terrorist video watched by triple killer Axel Rudakubana. The video, which shows a live-streamed knife attack by a terrorist on a bishop in Australia last year, was accessed by Rudakubana just before he set off from his home to murder three young girls at their Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29.
Ms Cooper revealed that Rudakubana had “easily” been able to order a knife on Amazon, and pledged to bring in new laws to tackle online sales of such weapons. She said a review found Rudakubana’s three referrals to the Government’s counter-terror scheme Prevent should not have been closed, allowing him to walk away from measures to tackle his problems.
The Home Secretary said the public inquiry would not only investigate how the three young girls murdered by Rudakubana were failed by multiple agencies, but also the “wider challenge of rising youth violence and extremism”. She said she was “deeply disturbed” by the number of teenagers drawn into extremism, serious violence and terrorism, largely by going online, with a threefold increase in under-18s investigated for terror links in just three years.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged that “institutional failings leap off the page” in the case of the Southport killer, and said the inquiry would leave “no stone unturned” to ensure such a tragedy never happens again. He said Britain now faces a “new threat” from “individualised extreme violence” and pledged to change the law if necessary to identify such violent individuals.