James Tozer - Reporter

Sadistic, cold-blooded, premeditated. The slaughter of three little girls in Southport was all of those things. Even now, though - especially after everything we have learned in the past week - one chilling fact is still hard to comprehend. That the perpetrator Axel Rudakubana was only 17 when he carried out the 'meticulously planned rampage' with a kitchen knife at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday dance class leaving three dead and eight children and two adults grievously wounded. The scale of the attack, and his determination to complete his mission, was synonymous with school massacres in the US but almost unprecedented in this country. The state had failed the victims of Southport, Keir Starmer admitted this week. Indeed, every agency who had contact with the troubled autistic teenager was found wanting, in one way or another....read