JazzG Those sorts will always jump on the case, when this murder happen there was clearly an information vacuum which should not have happened and the government need to look into that. We live in a different era now, an era of real time information so we clearly need to adapt in a way which would not cause a case to collapse but not let grifters push their narrative either.
Let's drill into this a bit.
When a horrible crime like this is committed, the authorities we have to look after it (the police, judiciary and the rabble of the "fourth estate" basically) have clear protocols about how to share information that are there for a reason.
It is obviously unsafe and bad practice to share identifying information about either victims or suspects freely after this kind of event. It risks prejudicing the legal process, it puts members of the public at risk from vigilante reprisals, it further traumatises the families of victims, and so on.
When this crime happened, a whole batch of predatory social media commentators spread misinformation about it, and when the "Ali al-Shakhti" rumour about the identity of the killer took hold, it was very widely circulated.
As a result, reporting restrictions on Axel Radukubana's identity were lifted early by authorities. As the timeline available to us on Wikipedia states:
In England and Wales reporting restrictions in place at the time of the attack prevented the disclosure of the identity of a suspect aged under 18 (unless otherwise authorised by a court), his identity was therefore, initially protected; however reporting restrictions were later lifted on 1 August by Liverpool Crown Court, citing concerns over the lack of confirmed identity fuelling misinformation. The recorder overturning the restrictions stated that continuing to prevent reporting of Rudakubana's name risked more unrest when he turned 18 on 7 August and his identity would have become publicly available.
So the attack took place at noon on 29 July and the identity of the suspect was released two and a half days later on the morning on 1 August.
There was an adjacent series of prolonged events of civil unrest, largely by white English people, across many towns. These were organised via Telegram and involved around a dozen fascist, nationalist, anti-immigration groupuscules, here's a list roughly cut and pasted from Wikipedia.
- English Defence League supporters
- Patriotic Alternative
- Britain First
- Ulster Defence Association
- Unidentified groups from the Republic of Ireland
- National Front
- British Movement
- Terrorgram affiliates
- Democratic Football Lads Alliance
- Active Club England
- Various football hooligan firms
Just thought I'd chuck the list there as you know, it gives an idea of how many of these fascist creeps crawled out of the woodwork desperate to enjoy instigating race hate.
In Southport itself:
In October 2024 the BBC confronted a 20-year-old man, who was an administrator in the "Southport Wake Up" Telegram messaging group, known as "Mr AG", and revealed him to be Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen, a neo-Nazi from Helsinki, Finland who shared online instructions on how to commit arson with the UK rioters.
This Telegram group had 15,000 members at the time.
Now, these riots continued long, long after it was revealed the killer was not a migrant, let alone a terrorist called "Ali al-Shakhti" invented by some Twitter fascist. In my opinion that's because "anti-immigration" is just a deniable way of saying "white supremacist" for the groups organising at these disturbances, and to a lesser extent for the more vaguely defined political constituency eager to attend. White, economically disenfranchised, racist, and quite literally eager to be "misinformed" if it means getting a race riot going.
The groups involved are are far closer to being "terrorist organisations" than 17 year old autistic maniac Axel Rudakubana downloading al-Qaeda PDFs. A pack of a few hundred or a few thousand gammon brownshirts and wannabes, getting their arson instructions from Nazis and their talking points from Tommy Robinson.
The criminal charges and convictions emerging from the civil unrest are starting to flow now as well, just as they are for Rudakubana after his horrendous and deranged crime.
If there is to be a public enquiry then it should take into account the factors that caused this crime to become a week long, nationwide spectacle of race riots.
