'No stone should be left unturned' in public inquiry into Southport stabbings after Axel Rudakubana 'slipped through system'

'No stone should be left unturned' in the public inquiry into the Southport stabbings, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said.

Reeves said the events that led up to the attack in July last year would need to be scrutinised in detail to ensure a similar incident could never happen again.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, was jailed for a minimum of 52 years for the murder of three girls who were attending a Taylor Swift dance event at a centre in the Merseyside town. Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, all died from their injuries.

Speaking to Trevor Phillips on his Sunday morning programme on Sky News, Ms Reeves said: “It’s appalling what happened in Southport and the evil, cowardly acts of that man.

“The impact will be felt forever by those families, and it’s right that there’s now a public inquiry to establish what on earth went wrong.”

She added: “The man was referred three times to Prevent, he’d been found carrying a knife on multiple occasions, and he’d attacked a boy he was at school with, and yet he was able to slip through the system.

“And so it is absolutely essential that we learn lessons, not just to provide some sort of understanding for the families of who have lost their loved ones, but also to stop anything like this ever happening again. And no stone should be left unturned in that inquiry.”

Ms Reeves said the inquiry would need to establish Prevent’s approach to determining ideology and what they regard as terror.

There has been a threefold increase in the number of children investigated for involvement in terrorism in the last three years, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament last week.

MPs heard that 162 people were referred to Prevent last year for concerns relating to