Rwandan karate expert father is in hiding with family after son becomes obsessed with extreme violence.

The karate expert father of Axel Rudakubana, who was unable to prevent his son from becoming fascinated with extreme violence, has been identified by MailOnline.

Alphonse Rudakubana and the rest of the family are described as “devastated” by the horrifying actions of his son, who has led them to seek refuge in hiding following a police relocation for their safety.

His father Alphonse, a member of an evangelical church, has been deeply affected by the tragic events in Southport. The church mentioned that Axel, known for singing hymns, had not been a part of their congregation.

The killer had been stopped by his father from carrying out an attack on the school that expelled him years before. 

At 12.20pm on July 22 last year, the teenager, now 18, armed himself with a large kitchen knife and left his home to get into a waiting taxi, booked under a fake name.

But his father, Alphonse, ran out and pleaded with the taxi driver not to take him on the 15-mile journey from the family home in Banks, Lancashire, to Range High School, in Formby, Merseyside. On July 29 Axel murdered three children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event.

It comes as ministers continue to face scrutiny over their handling of the killings, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper grilled in the Commons today as to why the government had not been more transparent. 

Her Tory shadow Chris Philp warned that stonewalling on the basis there was an investigation going on would no longer ‘cut it’ in an era of social media. But Ms Cooper said there was no way ministers could ignore the advice they were receiving about contempt of court.

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.’

Alphonse is a taxi driver who started a company called Redknapp Ltd in December 2018, when he listed his job as ‘trader’ and nationality as British.

The business activity of the company was given as retail sales via mail order or via the internet, as well as accounting and auditing activities and bookkeeping activities.

An article in the Southport Visitor described how Alphonse had passed his black belt in karate, saying he had started training in his native Rwanda in 1996, where he had studied for around three years before moving to Britain in 2002.

He continued to train in Cardiff with the Welsh Shotokan Karate Union at three different clubs before he moved to Southport in 2013, where he continued his training at the West Lancashire Karate Academy.

He travelled all over the UK to benefit from training under the top instructors from the Kase Ha Academy, according to the article, and represented the West Lancs Academy at the ESA National Kata Championships in Grimsby in 2013.

The article added: ‘It has been a long road for Alphonse, spanning nineteen years, two continents and three countries, but he firmly believes passing his dan grade was one of the greatest achievements of his life.’

Accompanied by pictures illustrating him putting his skills into effect, it said he had ‘cut a swathe through his opponents using a range of excellent kicking, punching and sweeping techniques’.

Axel Rudakubana’s mother, Laetitia Muzayire, appears to have spent time as a Christian minister.

She was listed on the page of a group called Re-forma, which seeks ‘to ensure that millions of pastors and church leaders are biblically-trained by providing a recognised, global standard for outcome- and impact-based assessment.’

In Cardiff, she had worked for the university’s Dentistry School where she took part in a charity quiz in March 2012 to raise money for Sport Relief.

She commemorated the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which an estimated 800,000 people from the Tutsi ethnic group died, in a social media post.

It read: ‘Our families, our friends, our kids, our people. Forever in our hearts.’

Her Facebook page features a white dove as the profile picture.

She also made a comment on the page of Christian preacher David Turner in April 2019, saying: ‘Pray for my family for more of the spirit of god.’

The following August she commented ‘alleluia’ on a page for Nathan Morris, a former Pentecostal pastor who runs the Shake the Nations ministry from Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

The political row over the government’s response to the Southport killings continued in the Commons today, where Ms Cooper defended the government’s decision not to immediately reveal information about Axel Rudakubana’s referrals to the Prevent scheme. 

‘We have been keen to publish the information on Prevent referrals from the start, but throughout the advice to us has been clear,’ she said.

‘If we had ignored the advice that we were given about the case that (was) put towards us and about the information that the police and the CPS were working through in order to get justice, and if as a result a killer had walked free, no-one would ever have forgiven the Government or anyone else.’

The clashes in the House came after Keir Starmer told a press conference in Downing Street that people were right to ‘demand answers’ over ‘failings’. 

However, he flatly rejected allegations of a ‘cover-up’ of terrorist links in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity in July – which was followed by a wave of rioting across the country. 

He confirmed he knew about the details ‘as they were emerging’ – rather than in October when extra terror-related charges were brought – but could not risk the case collapsing and the ‘vile’ perpetrator walking away free.

‘That is why the law of this country forbade me or anybody else from disclosing details sooner,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be forgiven if I had.’

He added: ‘It was not my personal decision to withhold this information, any more than it was a journalist’s personal decision not to print or write about it.’ 

Sir Keir said it was a ‘devastating moment in our history’ and must be a ‘line in the sand’ for Britain, warning that ‘terrorism has changed’ with the threat of ‘acts of extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms’. 

He stressed that the probe should be ‘unburdened by cultural sensitivities’ and institutions will not be allowed to ‘deflect’ responsibility. ‘I’m angry about it… Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry,’ he said.

Sir Keir said he was under ‘no illusions’ that the lack of ‘trust’ will continue until the state is ‘honest’ about problems and ‘roots them out’.

But he insisted he had been inspired by the response of the Southport community, who rebuilt despite the tragedy being compounded by violence on the streets.

‘Responsibility for the disorder and violence lies with those who perpetrated it,’ he said. 

The Tories and Reform said there were still ‘serious questions’ about the transparency of government information in the wake of the killings.

Laying out details of the public inquiry in the Commons this afternoon, Ms Cooper said it was ‘unbearable’ that action might have prevented the attack.

Challenged over the timing of information being released, Ms Cooper said: ‘It is not for the government to ignore the rules or the advice that we are given when justice for the families is at stake.’

Gregor Poynton, Labour MP for Livingston, asked what social media and search engine companies could do to stop young people accessing violent content.

The Home Secretary said: ‘The thing about social media companies is they have incredibly sophisticated technology and resources. These are the social media companies that know how to target every single one of us on things that we might be interested in, online, and to use their algorithms in all kinds of sophisticated ways.

‘They have the capability to do far more to identify this dangerous content and to take action on it. And I do believe that they should use those responsibilities rather than rowing back from content moderation, rather than reducing the responsible action they need to take.’

In the Commons, Mr Philp said: ‘On October 29 Rudakubana was charged with possessing the ricin and the terror manual, that was then made public. So, if it can be made public in October, without risking prejudice of the murder trial, it follows that it could have been made public in August, without prejudicing that same trial.

‘Background facts on other cases over the years have been made public after arrest and before trial without prejudice, and the shields relating to two of those cases are in this chamber. So why did the Prime Minister not make public some of this background information in August when he knew it, when later disclosure of that information in October demonstrated such disclosure could be made without prejudice?’

Ms Cooper said: ‘The British way of justice means that information is presented to the court by the police and CPS with restrictions on what can be said beforehand so the jury does not get partial or prejudicial information in advance, to make sure that the trial is fair and justice is done.

‘Social media puts those long-established rules under strain, especially when partial or inaccurate information appears online, and the Law Commission is reviewing the contempt of court rules in that light.

‘But, let me be clear, where the police, Government and journalists are given clear advice from the CPS about contempt of court or about not publishing information in advance of a trial, if we did not respect that and a killer walked free, we would never be forgiven.’

Sir Keir said earlier: ‘No words come anywhere close to expressing the brutality and horror in this case.

‘Every parent in Britain will have had the same thought. It could have been anywhere, it could have been our children, but it was Southport. It was Bebe, six years old. Elsie, seven. Alice, nine.

‘Back in August, I said there will be a time for questions, but that first, justice had to be done, and that, above all, we must not interfere with the work of the police, the prosecutors and the delivery of that justice.

‘Well, yesterday, thankfully, a measure of justice was done, but it won’t bring those girls back to their families, and it won’t remove the trauma from the lives of those who were injured, their lives will never be the same.

‘So before I turn to the questions that must now be answered for the families and the nation, I first want to recognise their unimaginable grief, because I know the whole country grieves for them.

‘The tragedy of the Southport killings must be a line in the sand for Britain.’

Laying out the new danger the country faces, Sir Keir said: ‘In the past, the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent. Groups like Al-Qaeda.

‘That threat of course remains. But now, alongside that we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety.

‘Sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups. But fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.

‘Now, it may well be that people like this are harder to spot. But we can’t shrug our shoulders and accept that.’

Sir Keir said the threat was similar to some of the mass shootings in schools in the US.

‘This is extreme violence, clearly intended to terrorise, and my concern is that because it is different to the sort of behaviour we’ve associated with terrorism – al Qaida, there are plenty of other examples, which tended to be more organised in groups with a clear political ideology and motive – because it is not that, it is a new and different threat, it doesn’t fit as well as it should within our framework,’ he said.

‘That is what we’ve got to change. That is the urgent question that has to be addressed and it’s one that has to be addressed before the conclusion of the inquiry and it’s why we’ve already done the learning from the Prevent mistakes.

‘I do think it’s new. You’ve seen versions of it in America with some of the mass shootings in schools. It is not an isolated, ghastly example, it is, in my view, an example of a different kind of threat and that is why I’m absolutely so determined that we will rise to that challenge and make sure that our law, our response, is capable, appropriate and can deal with that sort of threat.

‘But that is my concern, that is my thinking that this is a new threat – individualised extreme violence, obsessive, often following online viewing of material from all sorts of different sources.

‘It is not a one-off. It is something that we all need to understand and have a shared undertaking to deal with within our society.

‘That is not just the laws on terrorism, the framework on terrorism, it’s also the laws on what we can access online.

‘We still have rules in place in this country about what you can see at a cinema and yet online you can access no end of material. We have to ensure that we can rise to this new challenge and that is what I’m determined to do.’

Directly addressing the cover-up claims, the PM said: ‘Yes I knew the details as they were emerging

He said: ‘Yes of course I was kept up to date with the facts as they emerged. But just like you as a journalist I had to obey the law of the land.’

Asked if he viewed the killings as an act of terrorism – a label the police have not used – he insisted it was an act of ‘extreme violence clearly intended to terrorise’.

Announcing an inquiry last night, Home Secretary Ms Cooper said the country needed ‘independent answers’ on Prevent and other agencies’ contact with the ‘extremely violent’ Axel Rudakubana, and ‘how he came to be so dangerous’.

Following Axel Rudakubana’s guilty pleas, Sir Keir described the 18-year-old as ‘vile and sick’, and said there were ‘grave questions to answer’ on how the state ‘failed’ to protect the three girls.

The PM added: ‘Britain will rightly demand answers, and we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit.’

As well as the three murders, Axel Rudakubana admitted 10 counts of attempted murder, possession of a knife, production of a biological toxin, ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit acts of terrorism. The charges relating to the possession of ricin and the al Qaida training manual were not made public for three months after the teenager’s arrest. 

The terrorism offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual.

He is also understood to have possessed numerous other documents on violent subjects, including A Concise History Of Nazi Germany, The Myth Of The Remote Controlled Car Bomb and Amerindian Torture And Cultural Violence.

Sources said the material discovered showed an ‘obsession with extreme violence’ but there was no evidence he ascribed to any political or religious ideology or was ‘fighting for a cause’.