Starmer and police ‘covered up’ Southport terror links

Nigel Farage accuses Prime Minister of behaving ‘abominably’ and says public should have ‘been told the truth’

From the Telegraph and the Liverpool Echo

Sir Keir Starmer and the police were guilty of a “gigantic cover-up” over the Southport murders, Nigel Farage has said, as he suggested there might not have been riots if the public had been told the truth.

After Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the murder of three young girls and a terrorist offence on the first day of his trial on Monday, the Reform UK leader said the Government had behaved “abominably” from day one.

Mr Farage was prevented from asking questions in Parliament about Rudakubana’s background and whether he was known to the authorities and said the riots that followed the murders were caused by the withholding of information from the public, rather than the stabbings themselves.

Speaking from Washington DC, where he was attending the inauguration of Donald Trump, Mr Farage told The Telegraph that he had been told shortly after the murders that Rudakubana had been expelled from school for possessing a knife at the age of 13. It led Mr Farage to suspect that he might have been known to the authorities.

He said: “I was pretty certain from what I had been told very early on that this was a terrorist-related attack. I wanted to ask questions in Parliament about what the authorities knew about this man, but my rights of parliamentary privilege were taken away and I was not allowed to say anything, which is extraordinary.

“I wasn’t even allowed to ask any questions in Parliament, and the suggestion that it was because of ongoing court proceedings is completely wrong. This reflects very badly on the Prime Minister. We have been denied the truth on this by the police and the Government, it is disgraceful.”

“There has been a gigantic cover-up from day one, the authorities knew very very quickly about his expulsion from school, the ricin making and the Al-Qaeda material, yet they refused to class the murders as terror-related for fear of the reaction there might have been. . . ”

In an official document seen by the ECHO, it is stated Rudakubana was referred to Prevent four times ahead of the day of the attack, with one coming after he was found to have researched terror attacks, namely the London Bridge attack in 2017, at a specialist high school in 2021. Prevent is a multi-agency taskforce spearheaded by Counter Terrorism Policing which works to prevent vulnerable people being drawn into criminal behaviour. However the ECHO understands three referrals were actually received by Prevent.

This incident came after he was permanently excluded from Formby’s Range High School in October 2019 after being found with a knife in school. Two months later the teen returned to the school with a knife and hockey stick before attacking a pupil, the ECHO can confirm.

There was speculation as to why the police photograph taken on arrest (aka The Mugshot) was not released to the public as is normal. Such photographs, taken in harsh lighting so as to show up the planes of the face for future ID processes usually make the arrested person look rather grim; this was good from the point of view of the authorities when reporting on those who protested and were sent to prison.  They would want the convicted person to appear to the public as a grim, sullen, intimidating rather dim looking thug; not the pleasant grandmother or decent uncle seen later in family snaps. 

In this case if AI had been asked to produce a stereotype of an evil knifeman Grok couldn’t have done better. So much for the Welsh choirboy who appeared in a BBC Dr Who fanclub show.