A police chief whose team failed to escalate concerns about the Southport killer had previously bungled a probe into a notorious paedophile.
Dominic Scally headed up counter-terrorism policing for the North West and was responsible for officers who decided Axel Rudakubana’s behaviour did not warrant further intervention.
He was handed the role, which oversees anti-terror programme Prevent in the region, despite mishandling an investigation into sex offender Domenyk Lattlay-Fottfoy, previously known as Dominic Noonan.
A review found officers did not take Rudakubana’s obsession with massacre and extreme violence into account before he murdered Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in Merseyside, on July 29. Charlotte Littlewood, a counter-extremism consultant, said yesterday: “Questions to the local Prevent team, social services and police need to be answered.”
A year before being promoted, Mr Scally was investigated by the police watchdog for failing to protect a 13-year-old boy from predator Lattlay-Fottfoy. It found he led officers who saw the youngster entering the pervert’s Manchester home, but told them not to intervene.
Gross misconduct was not proven but he was rapped over his planning of the operation and hit with performance measures and a development plan. Lattlay-Fottfoy was jailed for 11 years in 2018 for child sex offences.
Mr Scally held the Prevent reins when Rudakubana was referred three times between 2019 and 2021 after teachers found him Googling school shootings, the London Bridge terror attack and Libya chief Muammar Gaddafi. But each time he fell into the “mixed, unstable or unclear ideology” category and deemed unsuitable for a voluntary radicalism intervention scheme.
There is no suggestion Mr Scally was aware of or involved in decisions over his referrals. He had headed the inquiry into the 2012 murder of Mark Short, 23, by gangster Dale Cregan, who later killed PCs Nicola Hughes, 23, and Fiona Bone, 32. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said a damning Prevent Learning Review found the Rudakubana referrals should have been passed to the specialist Channel programme for intervention.
But Prevent “prematurely” closed its case on the thug three years before his killing spree. The report found officers had “sufficient information” to escalate his case but decided not to. It said “too much focus was placed on the absence of a distinct ideology”.
Rudakubana was jailed for a minimum of 52 years at Liverpool crown court last month after admitting murder and warned he is unlikely to ever be freed. He also pleaded guilty to producing ricin and possession of information useful for terrorism.
Yesterday, the Mirror told how victims of both the Southport and Nottingham killings were let down by state failures that left culprits free to commit crimes.
Mr Scally and Greater Manchester Police, which runs the North West counter-terror outfit, declined to comment.
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