Dr Anthony Molyneux said Axel Rudakubana’s parents had ‘stage managed’ their son’s violent past when the teenager was referred to child mental health services
Southport monster Axel Rudakubana’s psychiatrist has accused his parents of ‘manipulating’ information about his violent past when he was referred to mental health services.
Dr Anthony Molyneux said he was aware the teenager had taken a knife into school but had not read about his previous violent incidents in his patient record, a public inquiry into the atrocity heard.
The consultant psychiatrist, who treated Rudakubana from July 2022, subsequently believed his risk to others was ‘minimal’ and the teenager was discharged just one week before his murderous knife attack on a dance class of little girls.
Dr Molyneux, who works for the Alder Hey Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), said Rudakubana’s parents, Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire, carried out a “studied manipulation” of his presentation at a level he had never experienced before.
He told the inquiry: “There would appear to be repeated occurrences of the family appearing to, shall we say, stage manage the presentation of information provided to professionals.”
Asked if his assessment of Rudakubana’s risk would have been “deeply flawed” without knowledge of the previous incidents, he said: “Let’s just say it would have a significant blind spot.”
He added: “What strikes me as different from pretty much every other case I’ve ever come across within my professional career was I would have expected that information to be at the foreground in what the family told me.”
Dr Molyneux told the inquiry he did not know Rudakubana had researched the Manchester Arena and London Bridge bombings, made remarks about stabbing people, or that he had been found on a bus with a knife.
He also did not know about an incident where Rudakubana attacked a fellow school pupil with a hockey stick.
The doctor also told the inquiry that Rudakubana appeared to have a “shopping list” of medication he wanted and had presented in appointments as an “unremarkable, sullen, untalkative, gawky teenage boy”.
He said when he took over psychiatric care of Rudakubana, his understanding was that he posed “minimal” risk to others.
And when he was discharged just seven days before his attack which left three girls dead, the then-17-year-old’s risk to others was said to be “none”.
The inquiry heard two different anti-depressants were prescribed to Rudakubana but he did not take them regularly.
Dr Molyneux accepted that a standard operating procedure document for Sefton CAMHS stated that clinicians should review the whole electronic patient record at each appointment to ensure they were aware of risk factors.
But he said it would have been “impossible” to review Rudakubana’s complete patient record and said instead he would have read an assessment letter.
Dr Molyneux said in a statement he was “100% confident” that his organisation had done everything they could and should have done to assess, treat, support and engage Rudakubana, as well as going “above and beyond”.
Asked about that comment, he said: “No matter how hard anyone and everyone works within these services there are system gaps which can only be remedied I think by having a unified system.”
Rudakubana, now 19, is serving a 52-year life sentence for the murders of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine.
The teen also admitted the attempted murder of ten others.
The inquiry at Liverpool Town Hall is continuing to hear evidence from mental health staff this week.
