Just before the second anniversary of his horrific murders, it has emerged that Southport killer Axel Rudakabana has been transferred from Belmarsh prison to Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital. Although this does not change the fact that he is serving a prison sentence, Broadmoor is a more comfortable and safer environment than a jail like Belmarsh. It’s also far more expensive. Instead of the approximately £100,000 per year Rudakubana cost us as a prisoner, he will now cost over £300,000 per year. He will remain in Broadmoor until psychiatrists decide he’s well enough to return to prison. Rudakubana has previously been described by a senior mental health clinician as having a ‘lack of empathy’ and a ‘fascination with violence’.
Under the Mental Health Act, if clinical and medical practitioners recommend a prisoner is moved to a secure hospital, the prison service is effectively obliged to abide by their recommendation to avoid legal challenge. But many people don’t believe that Rudakubana is genuinely mentally ill. Chris Walker, a lawyer who represents the families of the girls killed by Rudakubana, has said:
‘It is safe to say that whilst this news would devastate them at any time, the fact that this has occurred as we approach the second anniversary in our view is another move by AR who would appear to be attempting, once again, to manipulate the system’.
Walker is not the only one suspicious of Rudakubana’s motives. I spoke to Mark Fairhurst, National Chair of the Prison Officers Association (POA). He told me that:
‘Staff who dealt with this prisoner daily had no concerns for his mental health. A professional psychiatrist has decided that he needs to be transferred to a secure mental health facility and we must respect that position even if it angers us. Having said that I maintain this is a manipulation of the system and I hope once further assessment is carried out he returns to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.’
Rudakubana has a history of manipulating public officials. In 2019, police visited him at home following a threat he made to kill another pupil at his school. Both officers believed that Rudakubana had ‘both the means and intention of committing murder’. When officers explained to him that he might face arrest, the then 13-year-old boy talked his way out of trouble, with the officers deciding to neither arrest him nor conduct any criminal investigation. In 2022 Rudakubana was found by police in possession of a knife, ‘smiled and told’ officers that he wanted to stab someone. The police treated this ‘as a safeguarding issue’.
So this killer’s experience has been that the system will go easy on him, perhaps because it’s afraid of ‘racially stereotyping…a black boy with a knife’, as one teacher was accused of doing. Of course he will continue to manipulate the system in order to get an easier life then.
The Ministry of Justice told me that:
‘The families of those murdered and injured in Southport will be in this country’s heart forever and our thoughts remain with them. The offender who carried out these vile crimes will rightly spend the entirety of his 52-year custodial sentence locked up, and is unlikely to ever be released. High Secure Hospitals are not places of freedom. He will remain under constant supervision in a high-security psychiatric unit, and be returned to prison as soon as possible. The transfer of an offender follows a robust independent clinical assessment’.
None of it feels like enough though. Fifty-two years, whether in a hospital or a prison, won’t bring those three girls back. And it’s all at vast cost. If Rudakubana stays in Broadmoor he will cost us £15.6m over his sentence, down to around £5.4m if he’s back in prison within a year. That money could be far-better spent elsewhere in our justice or health systems. Filling our high security jails with violent, dangerous men with nothing to lose carries other costs too. Assaults on staff are very high. Indeed, Rudakubana himself was alleged in May 2025 to have attacked a prison officer with boiling water. It is not right that men and women doing a difficult job in our prisons face the risk of being seriously injured or maimed by men like this. Their presence in high-security jails also makes rehabilitation much more difficult for those with a prospect of release, because they make the jails themselves much more violent.
For men like Axel Rudakubana, whose guilt is beyond doubt, whose crimes were particularly sadistic and wicked, and for whom there is no possibility of rehabilitation or release, a far more civilised and pragmatic option would be to restore the death penalty. Nothing else feels just.
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