Decision not to classify Southport killer as a terrorist was right, says UK watchdog

Review concluded extending definition to cover extreme violence by ‘loners’ such as Axel Rudakubana is unhelpful

The decision not to classify Axel Rudakubana as a terrorist following the Southport murders was right because it would be unhelpful to stretch the definition of terrorism to cover all extreme violence, the UK’s terror watchdog has concluded.

Jonathan Hall KC wrote that the “legal definition of terrorism is already wide and should not be changed any further” in his post-Southport review of how extreme violence is legally classified. Expanding the definition would “increase the possibility of inaccurate use and, in theory, abuse”, he said.

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MoJ readies extra prison places in case summer riots happen again

Exclusive: Justice minister James Timpson says more cell capacity means emergency early release schemes won’t be needed

Prisons are being prepared to cope with a sudden influx of offenders in case there is a repeat of last summer’s riots, the justice minister, James Timpson, has told the Guardian.

Hundreds of extra makeshift cells and newly refurbished cells will be in use by the end of this year, officials have disclosed, as the prisons minister said there will be “no more emergency measures” such as early release schemes.

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Southport killer’s sentence will not be referred to court of appeal

Attorney general declines to refer Axel Rudakubana’s 52-year minimum sentence to unduly lenient sentence scheme

The sentence of the Southport killer will not be referred to the court of appeal under the unduly lenient sentence scheme, the attorney general has said.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, was handed a 52-year minimum sentence for murdering three girls at a dance class, the second-longest sentence imposed by the courts in English history, but the Southport MP Patrick Hurley previously asked the attorney general to review the sentence as “unduly lenient”, saying it is “not severe enough”.

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Parents of two murdered Southport girls speak of hearing news of attack

Parents of Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe also criticise televising of Axel Rudakubana’s sentencing

The parents of two of the girls murdered in Southport have spoken of the moment they were told “something awful has happened” to their children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

The families of Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe also called for more protection for children from the internet and criticised the decision to televise the sentencing of Axel Rudakubana, who was jailed last month for a minimum term of 52 years.

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Southport killer Axel Rudakubana jailed for minimum of 52 years for murder of three girls at a dance class in 2024 – as it happened

Rudakubana, 18, sentenced for murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe and attempted murder of 10 others

The legal counsel for the defence and prosecution have entered court.

The prosecution is led by Deanna Heer KC, with her junior Philip Astbury.

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PMQs live: Starmer to face Badenoch after announcing plan to end teenage access to knives online in wake of Southport attack

PM to face Tory leader following decision to announce tougher checks for people buying knives online

A new online train ticket retailer backed by the UK government is to be created, the Department for Transport (DfT) has announced, with the aim of simplifying the process of buying tickets from different rail operators. Joanna Partridge has the story.

PMQs is almost with us.

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UK experts warn of dangers of violent content being readily available online

Ofcom figures show number of people seeing material depicting or encouraging violence or injury has risen

Six minutes before Axel Rudakubana left home to murder three girls at a Southport dance class, he searched for a video of the Sydney church attack in which a bishop was stabbed while livestreaming a sermon.

That video from last April, which is still available online, was among Rudakubana’s internet history, which officials said showed his “obsession with extreme violence”.

The 18-year-old had reportedly spent hours in his bedroom researching genocides and watching graphic videos of murder, and had looked at material about school massacres in the US. Documents about Nazi Germany, “clan cleansing” in Somalia, electronic detonators and car bombs were also found on Rudakubana’s devices during police searches of his home.

The details of the shocking case have led Keir Starmer to warn that Britain faces a new threat of terrorism from “extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms accessing all manner of material online”.

“To face up to this new threat, there are also bigger questions,” the prime minister said on Tuesday.

“Questions such as how we protect our children from the tidal wave of violence freely available online, because you can’t tell me that the material this individual viewed before committing these murders should be accessible on mainstream social media platforms, but with just a few clicks, people can watch video after horrific video – videos that, in some cases, are never taken down. No. That cannot be right.”

The number of people seeing content online depicting or encouraging violence or injury has increased, according to Ofcom, the communications regulator. Its latest research, dating to May and June 2024, shows that 11% of users aged 18 and over had seen such material on social media and elsewhere online, up from 9% a year earlier.

Meanwhile 9% of internet users aged 13 to 17 had also seen content depicting or encouraging violence or injury. More broadly, as of June 2024, 68% of users aged 13 and over said they had encountered at least one potential harm in the past four weeks, the same proportion as reported in June 2023 and in January 2024.

Prof Sonia Livingstone, from the London School of Economics department of media and communications, said violent content was easily available and that there had been an increasing amount of research on boys and young men accessing misogynist and hateful material.

“That’s not to say everyone is looking at it and in my research I talk to lots of teenagers who avoid it, or see it and deplore it, or see it and are intrigued but wouldn’t dream of taking any action,” she said.

“So however much we can see that there’s a problem with online, in this particular case, it’s never going to be the whole explanation. We also have to look at the question of who was this young man.”

Rudakubana was obsessed by violence but was deemed to have no coherent ideology. Starmer promised legal reforms on Tuesday to allow attackers to be charged under terror laws despite lacking such an ideology.

Dr Julia Ebner, a researcher specialising in radicalisation, extremism and terrorism at the University of Oxford and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said there had been an increase in radicalisation cases involving people with “fluid ideologies”.

“It’s a phenomenon of our time,” she said. “We all have highly tailored content and individualised feeds on Instagram or TikTok or Telegram. Because people can be part of several different groups or subscribe to different channels, they will see the content that is radicalising them, and at the same time, misogyny and potentially white supremacy or Satanism.”

Rudakubana had downloaded an academic study on Al-Qaida that is banned under terror laws and which police believe he may have used to make the ricin. He also used security software to hide his identity when he bought knives from Amazon in the days before his attack on the Taylor Swift-themed dance club in Merseyside on 29 July last year.

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Southport killer will be treated as a terrorist in jail, Yvette Cooper tells MPs – as it happened

Home secretary also says inquiry into the attack will cover wider threat posed by youth violence

Starmer says nothing will be off the table in the inquiry.

There are also questions about the accountability of the Whitehall and Westminster system – a system that is far too often driven by circling the institutional wagons, that does not react until justice is either hard won by campaigners, or until appalling tragedies like this [take place].

Time and again we see this pattern, and people are right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it.

There are also bigger questions, questions such as how we protect our children from the tidal wave of violence freely available online.

Because you can’t tell me that the material this individual viewed before committing these murders should be accessible on mainstream social media platforms, but with just a few clicks, people can watch video after horrific video – videos that, in some cases, are never taken down,

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Axel Rudakubana was referred to counter-extremism scheme three times

Exclusive: Teenager who has admitted murdering three young girls in Southport was first referred to Prevent in 2019

The teenager who murdered three young girls at a dance class in Southport was referred three times to Prevent, the government’s scheme to stop terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned.

One of the referrals followed concerns about Axel Rudakubana’s potential interest in the killing of children in a school massacre, it is understood.

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