Senior Merseyside officer says he feared multiple attackers were at large during Southport attack

A senior police officer who was in charge the day of the Southport attack testified Friday that he feared Axel Rudakubana was not acting alone because he could not believe one person could inflict so many injuries. Chief Inspector Andrew Hughes, one of two force incident managers in the Merseyside Police control room, described handling the first 999 calls reporting a 'boy with a knife' just after 11:45 a.m. on July 29.

Rudakubana, 17, went on the rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the seaside town, killing Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), Bebe King (6) and Alice da Silva Aguiar (9) and injuring 10 others. Armed response vehicles were dispatched immediately, but while they were en route Hughes directed unarmed officers to assist if it was safe to do so. Two officers — Sergeant Gregory Gillespie and PC Luke Holden, who was armed with a Taser — entered the building and quickly detained Rudakubana.

Mr Hughes said his initial fear was that Rudakubana was not acting alone; the scale of casualties led him to consider that other offenders might be at the scene and could pose a risk to officers arriving to help. 'The amount of casualties... I found it difficult to understand how one person could inflict that many injuries to that many people, so a consideration for me was that there might be more offenders that we hadn't yet encountered,' he said.

Rudakubana refused to give his name to police at the scene and was not identified until taxi driver Gary Poland, 52, who had dropped him off at the Hart Space where the class was held, called Merseyside Police about 50 minutes later. Poland has apologised for failing to call police for almost an hour and is due to give evidence in person tomorrow.

The log notes described a warning marker for knives against Rudakubana and showed he had been logging onto school websites involving violence and mass shootings; he had also been referred three times to Prevent, the government's counter-terror strategy. In response, officers expanded searches of his home in Old School Close.

Counsel for the inquiry, John Goss, described potential lessons from the Manchester Arena attack in 2017 and suggested that in knife incidents it may be appropriate to deploy unarmed officers forward with caution in some circumstances. Hughes said the Southport attack was chaotic and horrific, but his training prepared him to act and he did not feel overwhelmed. 'It was a very chaotic, horrific incident which gets landed on you with no warning whatsoever but I felt able to discharge my duties effectively,' he said.

Rudakubana, who was 18 at his sentencing, was jailed for 52 years in January by Liverpool Crown Court for the murders of Stancombe, King and da Silva Aguiar. The cab driver Poland has apologised for failing to stop and help the injured girls and is due to give evidence in person tomorrow as the inquiry continues at Liverpool Town Hall.