Southport victim Bebe King's family slam new plans to share suspects' ethnicity

Southport victim Bebe King's family have urged the government to shelve new police guidance encouraging forces to publish the ethnicity and immigration status of high-profile suspects.

Little Bebe was the youngest of the three little girls killed in the horrific knife attack last year. The six-year-old was murdered alongside Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Bebe's grandfather, Michael Weston King, said they had been failed by the "despicable" far-right who "tried to make a political gain" from their loss. Mr Weston King urged ministers to reconsider their support for the new official guidance, slamming it as "completely irrelevant" information about suspects.

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He also hit out at Nigel Farage's "despicable" Reform UK, whose party has been calling for the guidance to be an enforced policy. Mr Weston King told the Guardian: "This apparent kowtowing to the likes of Farage and Reform, who surely want such a policy in place, is extremely disappointing, though perhaps not surprising.

“I not only speak for myself but for all of the King family when I say that the ethnicity of any perpetrator, or indeed their immigration status, is completely irrelevant. Mental health issues, and the propensity to commit crime, happens in any ethnicity, nationality or race.

“The boy who took Bebe had been failed by various organisations, who were aware of his behaviour, and by the previous government’s lack of investment in [the official anti-extremism strategy] Prevent . As a result, we were also failed by this.”

He added that the family “were failed further, by the likes of Reform and the right wing, as they tried to make political gain from our tragedy, only causing further misery to us and others, which was despicable”.

Teen killer, Axel Rudakubana, was jailed for a minimum of a 52 years for his attack on the Taylor Swift themed dance class full of children in July last year. In the days that followed, fascist thugs used the tragedy to incite riots across the UK. They spread false information that Rudakubana, a black Brit born in Wales to a Christian family, was in fact a Muslim asylum seeker.

The unrest saw scores of police officers injured, mosques and asylum hotels targeted and people of colour lynched indiscriminately in the streets. Home secretary, Yvette Cooper, welcomed new police guidelines released on Wednesday, despite criticism from anti-racism campaigners and women’s groups.

It follows claims of police “cover up” that two men charged in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, were asylum seekers. The far-right then staged an anti-immigration protest, where some worw Nazi imagery on their clothes and told a crowd the “far right must unite”.

A judge defied court guidance to publicly name underage Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, in a bid to stop the riots. But the violence only stopped once hundreds of thugs involved began receiving prison sentences.

Mr Weston King said: “Though we are not interested in retribution or revenge, we were glad to see that the rioters, along with those who spread lies and hatred online, received prison sentences. I very much hope that the mood and opinion of the nation is in keeping with ours, and that this plan does not go ahead.”