The £1.70 Amazon knife used by Axel Rudakubana in the Southport massacre was probably handed over to one of his parents, the retailer has suggested.
The driver who delivered the blade recorded that the package was given to someone who was visibly over the age of 25 at the then 17-year-old’s £130,000 Merseyside home.
His parents Laetitia and Alphonse have moved away from the area and are in hiding. Their local church, of which they were active members, has told MailOnline that they cut off contact when their son was arrested and charged last summer.
It has since emerged that days before the Southport attack Axel’s father stopped his son getting into a taxi to his old school to attack pupils in a confrontation caught on a Ring doorbell. There is no suggestion Rudakubana’s father knew what his son was planning.
Axel Rudakubana’s home life appeared chaotic. He was said to have been sleeping in the living room of the three-bedroom terraced house he shared with his mother and father. It was stacked with Amazon boxes. He also had the raw materials to kill almost 13,000 people hidden under his bunkbed in a room nicknamed the ‘Ricin lab’.
Amazon has found itself in the firing line because Rudakubana purchased one of their knives to murder three children and attempt to kill ten more.
But Jeff Bezos‘ company said that its driver followed the correct procedure and handed the knife to an adult. They are investigating how Axel Rudakubana circumvented age checks by using software to hide the fact he was 17, although his name was reportedly on the Amazon package.
The online retailer bans the sale of knives to anyone under 18. And when they are delivered it must be to someone who looks over 25 or someone aged between 18 and 25 who can prove it with a recognised ID such as a passport.
Amazon said that in Rudakubana’s case, its records showed the driver recorded that the knife was delivered to someone visibly over 25, which suggests that it will have been to his mother or father. His older brother was away at university.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, was jailed for a minimum of 52 years
Amazon delivered the knife to his father Alphonse Rudakubana (pictured) or mother Laetitia, it has been suggested, because the package went to someone over the age of 25
The £1.70 knife is still available on Amazon today. It comes with an age verification warning, which Amazon says was followed
The killer appeared to have been sleeping in the living room of the messy Merseyside home, which was littered with Amazon boxes
Rudakubana’s bedroom was used as a lab to make enough Ricin to kill almost 13,000 people
Equipment for the production of poison Ricin was found dotted across the house
Axel Rudakubana’s lunchbox of Ricin
There will be urgent investigation into ‘this tragic case’, Amazon has said.
Axel also got through the first stage of checks where credit checker Experian, the credit checker, using sources including the electoral register and bank details.
Rudakubana had ordered a Cerbera Apollo chef knife with a 20cm blade for £1.70.
The note under it reads: ‘This product is not for sale to people under the age of 18 and will require an online age verification check.
‘To confirm the recipient is over 18, valid photographic ID with a date of birth may also be required upon delivery.
‘The driver will input your year of birth into their device and may then require an ID check to complete the age verification process.’
Merseyside Police released pictures of the machete, crossbow, arrows and the grisly array of combat knives they found when they raided his home in the aftermath of the murders in July last year.
But their search came to an immediate halt when they discovered a container in which he was making the deadly poison ricin concealed in his bedroom.
They returned to the home in Bank wearing specialist protective equipment to remove the container before it was taken to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire.
Deanna Heer KC told Liverpool Crown Court that the 150 castor beans found at the scene could have produced between 1.07 and 5.33g of Ricin – enough to kill 12,500 people if inhaled.
Photos of the innocuous looking plastic lunchbox were released for the first time yesterday, showing the grimy mixture inside. In fact it was homemade Ricin.
Toxicologists at the world renowned Ministry of Defence laboratory found it contained ‘actively toxic ricin pulp’ which had been produced using equipment found in the defendant’s bedroom.
‘The castor beans could have been used to create about 2,500 to 12,500 doses if inhaled but to do that he’d have to carry out a further purification process and there’s no evidence he did,’ Ms Heer said.
Also found at the scene were goggles, sieves and a pestle and mortar with the remnants of castor beans still inside.
Even in their unpurified form the beans could have killed up to five people if eaten, the court was told.
Chemicals used in the preparation of ricin were also found in a bottle at the scene along with a laboratory beaker.
Ms Heer said a Porton Down expert had concluded the castor beans ‘had been used to make a crude preparation of ricin in sufficient quantities to be lethal, but he could not be sure that the further final purification process had taken place to produce ricin in liquid or powder form’.
Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, were stabbed to death by Rudakabana as they attended a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 22 last year.
Eight other children and two adults were also stabbed before the killer was disarmed by police at the end of his 12-minute murder spree.
The court heard that Rudakubana appeared to have been sleeping in the living room of the three-bedroom terraced house he shared with parents Laetitia and Alphonse.
His father ran a mail order business alongside his work as a taxi driver and pictures of the £130,000 house revealed a messy home filled with delivery boxes.
A pestle and mortar still bore the marks of his deadly mission
Two Apollo Cerbera knives with 20cm blades, one still in its sheath, were recovered days after he bought them on Amazon
A lethal crossbow was found in the bag where Rudakubana kept his newest knives
A grisly array of hunting arrows was also recovered from the teenager’s armoury
Equipment for sieving and filtering raw materials was among the finds
A laboratory beaker was recovered from the killer’s home
The killer had received the knife he used to kill the three children via an Amazon delivery days earlier and a stash of bottles with matches attached to the necks were also found in the living room.
Evidence from Amazon suggests the defendant purchased the equipment in early 2022, Ms Heer said.
The then 17-year-old, who admitted three counts of murder, was found in possession of articles and books that sources said proved an ‘obsession with extreme violence’.
This included texts on the genocide in his parents’ native Rwanda, Nazi Germany and tactics for urban warfare, as well as others containing gory details about torture and cannibalism.
One article detailing the use of car bombs by ISIS explained how they were ‘an incredibly powerful and versatile weapon’ that could ’cause unfathomable destruction in all sorts of environments’.
Merseyside Police yesterday released footage showing how Rudakubana attempted to set off from his home in Banks, Lancashire, to Formby, in Merseyside, 15 miles away.
His father Alphonse, whose family moved to Britain from Rwanda in 2002, is seen intervening and persuading his son to leave the car and return indoors.
The 17-year-old booked a taxi from his home to Range High School in Formby on July 22 last year, wearing the same green hooded sweatshirt and surgical mask he would have on during the dance-class attack a week later.
It is feared he was planning a high-school massacre, although police say there was ‘no evidence’ he had a knife with him.
An witness said: ‘There was a confrontation and Rudakubana was eventually persuaded to leave the vehicle.’ Rudakubana then went back inside.
There is no suggestion Rudakubana’s father knew what he is believed to have been planning at the school on July 22.
The video has been revealed as Rudakubana, now 18, was given a life sentence with a minimum of 52 years in prison after murdering three young girls in Southport last year – with trial judge Mr Justice Goose saying it was ‘not likely he will ever be released’.
Police have said that on July 29, the day of the murders, Rudakubana ‘changed his routine’ in response to having been intercepted by his father a week earlier.
On this occasion, instead of booking a minicab to the house, he walked to a nearby bus stop and then called a taxi to take him to Southport, a 15-minute drive away.
Rudakubana’s family have been left ‘devastated’ by the atrocity he inflicted and are now in hiding after police moved them for their own safety, a church attended by his father revealed this week.
An update on Rudakubana’s family was provided today by the leaders of The Community Church in Southport, Dave Gregg, Geoff Grice, Harry Pickett and Mike Rothwell.
They told MailOnline in a statement: ‘The family was saddened and shocked at the terrible attack that took place in Hart Street this summer.
‘This tragedy and the devastating murder of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice Da Silva Aguiar, has impacted our town and nation.
‘Axel was born and went to school in the United Kingdom, he has autism and is known to have struggled with mental health issues. ‘Prior to the major incident in Southport, he had been living with his parents in the village of Banks near Southport.
‘There has been the inevitable speculation about his family and background – with his father Alphonse being named in the national press.
‘It has also been reported that his parents are both Christians and attend a local church.
‘To prevent unnecessary intrusion into other churches in our town, we can confirm that over the last few years Alphonse Rudakubana has been a valued part of The Community Church family.
‘For the sake of clarity, Alphonse’s son has never attended our Sunday gatherings, nor played any active part in church life.
‘As a consequence we have nothing further to say other than the detail given in this statement.
‘The Rudakubana family have been devastated following this terrible incident and they have been moved by the police, for their protection, from their home in Banks to a secret location that we are unaware of and we have had no contact with them since Axel was arrested and charged.’
The statement added: ‘The subsequent outpouring of love and support by the local community actually reflects the true nature and spirit of our town but sadly this was eclipsed by the appalling attack on the local Mosque – fuelled by fake racially motivated news on social media – which resulted in so many awful injuries to police and damage being caused to buildings and property.
‘As a church we continue to pray for peace and healing for all those impacted by the tragic events that took place in Southport and in our nation beyond.
‘People still need time to grieve and mourn, as they try to process everything that has happened. We would therefore ask that respect, time and space be given so that the healing process can continue.’
The Rudakubana family moved to the Merseyside seaside resort of Southport in 2013, where his father Alphonse worked as a taxi driver.
They moved to the address where they were living at the time of the murders, a £170,000 three bedroom terraced house, in 2018.
The family are said to be regular church-goers and his mother Laetitia appears to be a practising Christian with a white dove and various entries for evangelical ministers on a Facebook page in her name.
His father is a keen exponent of karate.
The family has since been rehoused and are in hiding.
Alphonse – who would have been 18 at the time of the genocide – is understood to have been a soldier in the Rwanda Patriotic Front in the early 1990s.
A group of exiles from the minority Tutsi community, the rebel army invaded Rwanda in 1990.
Today former RPF commander Paul Kagame is president of Rwanda.
Multiple sources in the country and among the Rwandan expat community told the Mail the Rudakubanas continued to have close links with ‘high status’ figures linked to the regime.
Today they distanced themselves from Axel Rudakubana’s monstrous crimes, insisting Rwanda’s bloody past played no part in the British-born teenager’s descent into mass murder.
Instead they blamed his exposure to graphic images of brutal killings and atrocities which he was able to access online, coupled with his mental state.
‘Axel has trauma and autism which causes him mental health issue and he did what he did unconsciously,’ one relative told the Mail on condition of anonymity.
A source added: ‘They think this was caused by exposure to violent materials online.’
