Police are investigating an incident
Police are investigating an alleged attack on a prison officer by Southport triple murderer Axel Rudakabana. The 18-year-old is currently serving a life sentence for killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class on July 29 last year.
The incident reportedly happened at HMP Belmarsh. Rudakabana was in his prison cell at the time of the attack, and allegedly used boiling water from a kettle in the room, as reported by Sky News.
He then allegedly threw the boiling water over the officer through a hatch in his cell door. The prison officer was taken to hospital as a precaution but only suffered minor injuries.
Speaking to Sky News, a Prison Service spokesperson said: “Police are investigating an attack on a prison officer at HMP Belmarsh yesterday.
“Violence in prison will not be tolerated and we will always push for the strongest possible punishment for attacks on our hardworking staff.”
Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time, unleashed 12 minutes of unimaginable horror at a Taylor Swift-themed workshop after he entered armed with a knife and took the lives of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, as well as injuring eight children and two adults – teacher Leanne Lucas and local businessman John Hayes.
He was arrested at the scene and within an hour and a half armed police flooded Old School Close in Banks, just a few miles from the scene of the tragedy. It was there that police stormed Rudakubana’s home, and where officers found a plethora of weapons, including steel-tipped arrows, a machete and what appeared to be Molotov cocktails.
As well as the arsenal of weapons in his possession, including a 20cm kitchen knife identical to that used in the attack ordered from Amazon, officers also found ricin, a potentially fatal toxin produced using castor beans, 150 of which he had purchased online in early 2022.
According to experts, this quantity would have been enough to produce up to five lethal doses via ingestion. It also had the potential to kill between 1,500 and 7,600 via injection, or up to 12,690 through inhalation after a “further purification process”.
In January this year, Rudakubana was handed life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 52 years, after changing his pleas to guilty on the opening day of his trial at Liverpool Crown Court.
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