Jonathan Coffey & Judith Moritz
In the aftermath of the Southport knife attack there was a sense of national trauma over the killings of three girls at a summer holiday dance and yoga class. Seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King who was six, and nine-year-old Alice Aguiar were murdered. Eight other children were badly injured.
Anger and disbelief soon followed, prompting burning questions over the identity, background and possible motive of the attacker, and suspicions about why the authorities appeared to be saying a lot less than they knew.
Despite public demands for information, the police provided few details about the attacker. There was very little information in their statements about his background. He was not even named because he was 17 at the time of the attack. One thing was made public early on - it was not being treated as terror-related by the authorities.
The UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has told BBC Panorama that he believes the quality and quantity of information released by the authorities in the hours after the attack on 29 July 2024 was "inadequate".
"People got the sense that something was being withheld or fudged in some way, and that led the social media types who wanted to spread disinformation to spread disinformation," Jonathan Hall KC said.
The day after the attack, rioters targeted a mosque in Southport. The online rumour mill had identified the attacker as a Muslim asylum seeker who had been on an MI6 watch list. It was all untrue but it served as fuel for four days of rioting and violence - the worst the UK had seen in more than a decade.
There was swift and widespread condemnation, but this was not confined to the violence and disorder. The very act of questioning whether the authorities were withholding information from the public was also criticised on the grounds that it had stoked the flames of disorder.
But the questions have not gone away.
What the police said, and when they said it, is important. On the evening of the attack, the Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, Serena Kennedy, held a press conference. She said "a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff" had been arrested in connection with the stabbings.
This was true - but police did not divulge family background details, including that the attacker's parents were Christians who had come to the UK from Rwanda.
The attacker was not named because he was one week shy of his 18th birthday. In that initial statement, the police said the motive was "unclear" but at that moment in time the incident was "not being treated as terror-related".
But Jonathan Hall KC told BBC Panorama that the authorities could, and should, have released more information after the attack.
"The public could have been told immediately that there had been an attack by a 17-year-old male who was black, British, born in Wales and has lived in the UK all his life," he told us.
"That he comes from a Rwandan background, and as far as the police were aware, from a Christian background. That it was not possible to say whether he had an ideology or that he was a terrorist. But the police are looking at, at pace, all the material that they found."
Ultimately, the Southport attack was never classed as terrorism by the authorities as that would have required evidence of an ideological motive, and the police have said they found no such evidence.
"We were clear that there was no evidence, information or intelligence to suggest that this was terrorist related," Chief Constable Serena Kennedy told Panorama.
"We were really clear that we would keep that under continual review, which we've done from day one. But our colleagues in counter-terrorism policing, working with ourselves, were satisfied that this was not a terrorist related incident, and that's remained the case throughout."
Jonathan Hall agrees with this assessment, but says that in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the police should have said it was not possible at that stage to say whether the attacker was a terrorist or not.
Counter-extremism expert Ian Acheson agrees. "I don't think they could conceivably have arrived at that conclusion on the basis of the evidence," he said.
"I think the commas decision was 'let's say as little as possible and let's try to dampen down community feeling by saying, 'no, there's nothing to see here',' which of course then created a narrative that was exploited by misinformation and disinformation."
Jonathan Hall KC was appointed to his role in 2019
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