Southport inquiry: Axel Rudakubana’s brother feared he would kill their father before attack

Axel Rudakubana’s brother feared he would kill a family member two years before the Southport attack, an inquiry has heard.

Dion Rudakubana, who is two years older than his brother, said Axel has a "short temper" and was prone to "violent outbursts", hitting him regularly when they were children.

He said Axel's behaviour escalated after he was expelled from the Range High School in Formby, Merseyside, in 2019 and their parents had "lost control".

The public inquiry into the Southport attack heard by the time he left for university in 2022, Dion feared his brother would kill a family member.

In messages sent to a friend when he returned to the family home for Christmas, Dion said: "My brother doesn't show mercy, my dad just has to try not to die... We hide knives to mitigate that factor."

He told the inquiry there were times the police would be called out and recalled one incident when "my father was holding my brother off".

"I remember being scared somebody was going to die… my dad," he says.

Rudakubana was 17 when he murdered Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in a knife attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 last year.

Eight other children, who cannot be identified because of their age, were also injured, along with yoga instructor Leanne Lucas, who was leading the dance class, and businessman John Hayes, who was one of the first people on the scene and tackled the killer.

Giving evidence from a remote location by video-link, Dion's voice could be heard but he could not be seen at Liverpool Town Hall.

After swearing on the Bible, he told how he and his brother grew up in Cardiff after their parents Laetitia Muzayire and Alphonse Rudakubana came to the UK from Rwanda and were granted asylum.

Dion says the genocide had a "very heavy influence on them" but he doesn't feel he was "traumatised" by his parents' experiences.

His mother and father studied for degrees and moved to Southport in 2013 because his mother got a job, while his father started working as taxi driver because "he was not finding work in the area he studied in", Dion said.

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He told how Axel was resentful of him after they had to move schools because of his health issues.

Dion said Axel was physically bigger, and he felt "increasingly wary" of his younger brother who would regularly hit him and smash plates and glasses in their home.

Dion said the last interaction he had with his brother was in the summer of 2023, when Axel threw a metal bottle at him, but luckily he had already closed the door.

In his witness statement, Dion compared his brother with the "sociopath" played by Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, who kills ten people over the course of the film.

"I watched it recently and it concerned me," he told the inquiry, which continues on Wednesday.

(c) Sky News 2025: Southport inquiry: Axel Rudakubana’s brother feared he would kill their father before att