Southport stabbing latest: rioting ‘thugs’ have disrespected victims’ families, local MP says | UK news

Jason Rodrigues

A local news service based in Southport, On The Spot News, is reporting that “100 members of the community are repairing damage to the local mosque, seen here rebuilding a wall.”

• 50 police officers were injured during violent protests following a vigil for the victims of Monday’s knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, Merseyside Police Federation said.

• Local residents said rioters attacked a mosque and used bricks as missiles last night. Many helped with the clean-up operation this morning to repair the damage caused by the disorder.

• Southport’s MP, Patrick Hurley, said the violent rioters were not local to the area and must face the “full force of the law”. He said the riots occurred because of the “propaganda and lies” spread on social media about the identity of the attacker. “These people are utterly disrespecting the families of the dead and injured children and utterly disrespecting the town,” the MP told the BBC.

• Merseyside police confirmed that eight officers suffered serious injuries including fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and a concussion.

• Police believe those involved in the violent unrest included supporters of the English Defence League (EDL).

• Humza Yousaf, the former first minister of Scotland, has called for the EDL to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation after the riots.

• Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were all fatally stabbed in Southport on Monday. According to the PA news agency, Jenni Stancombe, Elsie’s mother, wrote on Facebook: “This is the only thing that I will write, but please please stop the violence in Southport tonight. The police have been nothing but heroic these last 24 hours and they and we don’t need this.”

• A 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons because of his age, remains in custody accused of murder and attempted murder. The only details released about the suspect by police are that he is a 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire, who was born in Cardiff.

• Police have said that, although the motive for the attack was unclear, it was not believed to be terror-related.

You can read the latest developments on what has happened since the stabbings in this report by my colleague, Caroline Davies.

Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, the Guardian’s north of England editor, has been speaking to local people in Southport in the aftermath of the riots last night.

Residents in Southport have expressed their disgust and dismay after rioters tore down walls and smashed cars while attacking police officers shortly after a peaceful vigil to remember the young victims of Monday’s attack.

The Guardian was told on Wednesday that rioters broke into locals’ sheds, looted a shop and hot-wired a car that was driven at police officers.

Suzanne Jerran, the owner of Windsor mini mart, said she feared for the lives of her tenants when “a mob” broke into her shop and set fire to an industrial bin outside to ram at riot police.

Holding back tears as a huge clean-up operation got underway on Wednesday, she said: “Why are they picking on us? Why are they damaging our town? This is a struggling seaside town as it is. We’ve lost so much to the likes of Liverpool. And now our struggling community is under attack from these yobs that are coming in.

“What did we do to deserve this? We’ve already lost our children. Our community is grieving. How dare they come here to our town and do this? It’s disgusting. It really is disgusting.”

Jerran’s family have owned the shop near Southport mosque since 1993 but leased it out to a Sri Lankan businessman who turned it into a corner shop three years ago.

She said she saw on social media a “huge mob of young lads” outside the shop before her tenant phoned her to say “men with fire were coming into the shop”. They looted all of the cigarettes and many bottles of alcohol, she said.

“My first reaction was to phone the fire brigade to get them to come down because my concern was for loss of life. That was my main concern. You can’t replace that, can you? It’s a human being.”

Jerran said she was concerned “because there’s been adverts on Facebook saying there’s going to be future riots in this town”.

She added: “It certainly wasn’t local people because we don’t do this to each other. You can see yesterday the solidarity that was behind the support that was happening in the town centre, all the tributes that were laid last night, and all the tributes that are laid on the roads behind me for all those poor kids that were injured.”

The mother of one of the young girls killed in Monday’s knife attack has condemned the violence that broke out in Southport last night, the PA news agency has reported.

Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were killed in what police described as a “ferocious attack” during a Taylor Swift themed dance and yoga workshop on Monday.

The PA news agency has now reported that Elsie’s mother, Jenni Stancombe, wrote on Facebook: “This is the only thing that I will write, but please please stop the violence in Southport tonight.

“The police have been nothing but heroic these last 24 hours and they and we don’t need this.”

Scotland’s former first minister Humza Yousaf has called for the English Defence League (EDL) to be proscribed under terrorism laws following the riot in Southport.
Merseyside Police have said they believed the group – which threw bricks at a mosque in the seaside town following a knife attack which killed three girls on Monday – was made up of supporters of the EDL.

Yousaf wrote on X:

Violence targeting police officers, the public, and mosques, all to drive forward the far-right’s hateful ideology.

Rhetoric is not enough. We need to take action against the far-right. I have asked the home secretary to use her powers to proscribe the English Defence League.

In a letter to the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, Yousaf claimed that “Britain has a far-right problem”, urging her to use anti-terrorism powers to make membership of the group illegal, while ackowledhing this would not be an “overnight fix”.

“It is time we took on the English Defence League and the evil ideology that drives them,” he wrote.

Yousaf said the proscription would demonstrate the new Labour government’s intention to be “proactive in tackling far-right violence and terror that has been allowed to run rampant in the streets of the UK for far too long”.

Norman Wallis, chief executive of Southport Pleasureland, was among those helping to clean up at the junction of Sussex Road and St Luke’s Road after the riot last night.

He said:

There are hundreds of people who have responded, and we’ve ended up with lots of people down here today, all from the local community and helping with the fantastic clean-up It’s horrendous what those hooligans have done last night.

It was like a war scene. People from out of town just causing absolute mayhem. People in hoods climbing up lampposts, throwing bricks, they set a police car on fire. But none of those people were the people of Southport.

The people of Southport are the ones here today cleaning the mess up. Those people from out of town – they came in in buses and cars and had change of clothes. They just started to riot and do this.

Merseyside Police Federation (MPF) has issued a statement after dozens of officers were injured in the riot last night which saw police vehicles being set alight and missiles hurled at officers. As we reported earlier, the North west ambulance service said it treated 39 patients in total, all of which were police officers. The MPF said over 50 police officers were injured.

Chris McGlade, chair of Merseyside Police Federation, said police officers should be going home at the end of their shifts, not to hospital. His statement reads:

Merseyside is reeling from an unimaginable tragedy. An incident that has left us all shocked as human beings. We are equally shocked as police officers.

The very same courageous officers who are themselves trying to come to terms with what has happened in Southport this week came under a sustained and vicious attack last night.

It is utterly disgusting that more than 50 police officers were injured.

Brave colleagues have been left with fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and concussion.

I utterly condemn the actions of these mindless and violent thugs – and they will be brought to justice for their actions.

The Federation are supporting our injured colleagues at this horrific time and send them our best wishes – as I know the rest of the country will do.

Police officers are not robots. We are mothers and fathers. Sons and daughters. Husbands, wives and partners. We should be going home at the end of our shifts. Not to hospital.

What exactly happened in the Southport riot last night?

Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, the Guardian’s north of England editor, has been reporting from Southport since Monday. He has this account of the violence that broke out last night, which you can read in full here.

Hundreds of people had taken part in a peaceful vigil on Tuesday evening outside Southport’s Atkinson arts venue, with many in tears as they laid flowers and cards of remembrance. But the vigil was followed by a far-right protest outside a local mosque, which quickly turned violent.

Demonstrators gathered in the area surrounding Hart Street, where Monday’s killings took place. The crowd of hundreds were heard shouting Islamophobic slogans as well as “no surrender”, “English till I die” and “we want our country back” as a police helicopter circled overhead.

Riot police charged at the demonstrators after a police van was set alight and other police vehicles were damaged . Officers used teargas on the angry crowds of predominantly men covering their faces.

Some officers were injured after plant pots and empty bins were among the missiles hurled at them and the Southport mosque building. A group of people attempted to overturn a riot van. Some men were seen pulling down a crumbling wall to use the bricks as weapons, pelting officers with them. Others ripped open black bin bags looking for objects to throw.

Some spectators watched from front gardens, while passersby looked on, saying: “I can’t believe it, it’s horrible isn’t it?” Another said: “This doesn’t achieve anything.”

The violence was so serious that Merseyside police were forced to call in reinforcements. Officers were rushed in from north Wales, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Cheshire.

As officers from five forces struggled to bring the disorder under control, police introduced a 24-hour section 60 order giving officers enhanced stop and search powers, and a section 34 dispersal order allowing police to seize any item, including vehicles, used to commit anti-social behaviour, as well as being able to tell people to leave the area.

Patrick Hurley, the MP for Southport, has also been speaking with Times Radio this morning. He said the riots occurred because of the “propaganda and lies” spread on social media about the identity of the attacker.

The only details released about the suspect by police described him as a 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire who was born in Cardiff.

Hurley told Times Radio:

Because of the propaganda and the lies that were being spread around on social media from within minutes of the news breaking on Monday afternoon about the tragic incident.

We’d had all sorts of lies being spread and misinformation being spread about the alleged perpetrator and some people with the best of intentions then they tried to rebut this, they tried to argue back, but all that happens is you’re just amplifying people’s false messaging.

This misinformation doesn’t just exist on people’s internet browsers and on people’s phones. It has real world impact.

And what happened is that the real world impact of that was that we then had hundreds of people descending on the town, descending on Southport from outside of the area, intent on causing trouble, either because they believe what they’ve written, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote it in the first place, in the hope of causing community division.

On Wednesday morning, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) paid tribute to the three girls killed, before condemning “shocking scenes of far-right rioters running amok outside a mosque”. The MCB called it an Islamophobic backlash that began with a false rumour on the internet.

The MCB secretary general, Zara Mohammed, said: “At a time of great tragedy, loss, and mourning, we must stand firm against the cynical forces of hatred and division. This does not represent our diverse Britain and the people of Southport.”

Thirty-nine police officers were injured during violence in Southport last night after protesters pelted police with glass bottles and bricks and attacked a mosque following a knife attack that killed three children.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were all fatally stabbed in Southport on Monday, while a 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, remains in custody accused of murder and attempted murder.

In the aftermath of the knife attack, several false accusations were spread on social media with incorrect names of the suspect.

Merseyside Police said “a large group of people – believed to be supporters of the English Defence League” – began to throw items such as bricks towards the mosque in the seaside town at around 7.45pm.

Southport’s MP, Patrick Hurley, has said the violent rioters must face the “full force of the law” after Merseyside police confirmed that eight officers suffered serious injuries including fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and a concussion. Other officers suffered head injuries and serious facial injuries, and one was knocked unconscious.

Hurley made clear that the people who rioted in the normally quiet seaside town of Southport last night “were thugs who’d got the train in”, not residents, as he condemned the violence.

Hurley told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning:

These were thugs who got the train in, these were not the people from Southport.

They were using the horrific incident on Monday, the deaths of three little kiddies, for their own political purposes and actually to attack the very same first responders and the very same police, who had been on the scene on Monday, were then being pelted with bricks the day after by these thugs.

There’s no way to describe that other than to say it’s utterly reprehensible and we must identify these people and make sure that the full force of the law is down against them.

These people are utterly disrespecting the families of the dead and injured children and utterly disrespecting the town.

We will bring you the latest updates on last night’s riots and the ongoing investigation into Monday’s deadly attacks, for which a motive still has not been established by police.