FBI joins Southport killer investigation amid reports of wiped search history

The FBI and US Department of Justice have agreed to help UK police investigate Southport killer Axel Rudakubana.

The 18-year-old was jailed for a minimum of 52 years in January after murdering three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July last year.

In a joint statement, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Merseyside Police said: “The Southport attack has devastated the lives of the victims, their families and the wider community.

“A specialist liaison CPS Prosecutor in the United States has been working with international partners to obtain material which may be relevant.

“We are thankful to the US Department of Justice and the FBI for their ongoing assistance and the importance which they have placed upon our request.”

According to reports, investigators now hope to recover deleted searches from the killer’s Google and Microsoft accounts within weeks.

Police discovered a number of devices during a search of Rudakubana’s home in Banks, Lancashire after he fatally stabbed Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, at a dance class in Southport on July 29 last year.

The 18-year-old cleared his internet history before he left to travel to The Hart Space just after 11am.

A search on social media site X for the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, made minutes before he left home, was the only thing that remained, police have said.

To uncover what Rudakubana had been searching for in the days and months before his stabbing spree, detectives needed to go through US companies Microsoft, which owns the search engine Bing, and Google, which owns the browser Chrome.

Senior investigating officer Detective Chief Inspector Jason Pye said in January that the process to get the information is ongoing, but “could be years”.

If the incident had been classed as a terror attack, he said, the process could have been easier.

He said: “Our case has always been, based on the evidence, it’s not counter-terrorism. There is nothing in terms of ideology.

“So I couldn’t go down that path to try and get that information any quicker.

“There is a process of getting it quicker, but because it’s in the serious organised crime, major crime category, unfortunately, I can’t get it as quick as we would like.

“The process of getting that could be years. It could take us years.”