The innocent victims of Axel Rudakubana had probably never known there was evil in the world until the day of his attack, the officer who investigated the case has said.
The 18-year-old, of Banks, Lancashire, murdered six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, and injured 10 others, including eight children, when he entered a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29 armed with a kitchen knife.
Detective chief inspector Jason Pye, who led the investigation, said no training course could have prepared his officers for the horror of what they saw.
He said: “If you think about this, the majority of those children probably didn’t even know there was any evil in the world that day.
“We talked about this evil and good coming together. The world’s most evil, with some of the good in the world coming together.
“It’s really difficult for anybody to try and understand, because we don’t.
“We’ve not found out why he’s done it. Why would he pick them, the most vulnerable?”
Mr Pye said Rudakubana’s guilty pleas, which came on Monday as his trial was due to begin, came as a “surprise to everybody”.
He said: “There was absolutely no indication that he was going to co-operate with any part of the judicial system.”
Asked why he believed Rudakubana had decided to admit his crimes, he said: “Your guess is as good as mine. Has he tried to control this all the way through? Is he that clever? I don’t know.
“My view is probably he’s trying to control it. But again, unless he was ever to speak up, we would never know.”
He said although Rudakubana did not speak in court before his sentencing hearing, there was some co-operation with his legal representatives.
When the prosecution proposed to read statements or play video interviews to avoid witnesses having to give evidence in court, his defence team argued that all witnesses should be called, Mr Pye said.
But, the detective said no children would have been called to court to give evidence.
He said: “I made the decision on day one, probably the first decision I ever made was there will be no child interviewed in this process.
“The evidence was so strong I didn’t need that.
“There was no way I was ever going to put a child through the trauma of this.”
