THE senior officer on the Southport killings case would have preferred it was treated as a terror attack.
Det Chief Insp Jason Pye said it would have given police greater powers to handle the arrest of Rudakubana.
PAThe senior officer on the Southport killings case, which saw Axel Rudakubana jailed for a minimum of 52 years, would have preferred it was treated as a terror attack.[/caption]
EPADet Chief Insp Jason Pye stated classifying the Southport tragedy as a terror attack would have given police more time and powers to interrogate Axel Rudakubana[/caption]
The Merseyside Police officer said: “All day long I’d have been happy for someone to say, ‘It’s a terrorist attack’.
“There was absolutely no benefit for us in this never being called terrorism.
It would have absolutely meant that we had time to do a lot more things, but we’re confined in the law, unfortunately.
“He’s created mass murder, there’s no doubt about that.”
A terror charge would have let cops question the knifeman for a week instead of just 72 hours.
But prosecutors said although Rudakubana had an al-Qaeda training manual, there is no proof he believed in a particular extremist ideology.
PM Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to change the law to let lone killers with “extreme individualised violence” be charged with terrorism, even if they cannot be linked to certain extremist beliefs.
He said: “Looking at the facts of this case, it’s clearly extreme violence intended to terrorise.”
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