A teenager accused of murdering three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class once appeared in a BBC Children in Need video dressed as Doctor Who, it has emerged.
Axel Rudakubana, 17, was named as the suspect in the stabbings in Southport, in which eight other children and two adults were seriously injured on Monday.
Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were all killed in the attack.
A little more than 24 hours after the Cardiff-born appeared at Liverpool Crown Court, footage has emerged showing him in the advert.
Aged 12 at the time, Rudakubana dressed in a brown trench coat, blue suit and a tie coming out of a Tardis.
In the 45-second clip, he tells viewers ‘It’s that time of year again’ before advising on how best to raise money for Children In Need including dressing ‘as every Doctor Who ever’.
He also told viewers ‘You can run from John O’Groats to Land’s End – backwards’.
The video – filmed in Blackpool in 2018 – was deleted earlier today by both the BBC and the Ology child talent agency that represented him, the Daily Mail has reported.
At the time of filming, Rudakubana had joined the drama group at his school to meet friends, it was reported.
This saw him perform on a West End show at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London.
He was also said to be keen on singing, with neighbours in the village of Banks, near Southport, revealing that he was part of a local church choir.
A BBC Children in Need spokesperson said, after the video was discovered: ‘Our deepest sympathies go out to everyone impacted by this shocking case.
‘We have removed the video from all of our platforms out of respect to them.’
More and more if being revealed about the defendant in the hours after his name was made public by a judge.
Rudakubana turns 18 next week and the judge saw fit to lift restrictions as he was mindful of ‘misinformation’ that had spread regarding his identity.
A claim that the suspect was an asylum seeker or immigrant has been viewed at least 15.7 million times across X, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, a Reuters analysis showed.
A false claim that he was an undocumented migrant who arrived in a small boat appeared on the website ‘Channel 3 Now’.
Andrew Tate on Tuesday shared a picture of a man he said was responsible for the attack with the caption ‘straight off the boat’.
But this was also incorrect as it was a picture of a 51-year-old man arrested for a separate stabbing in Ireland last year.
Thousands of people online also falsely claimed another man pictured with a knife in French media after an attack in Annecy last June was the Southport suspect.
The man, a Syrian refugee, has been in pre-trial detention in France since then.
Separately, a Channel 4 analysis showed that 49% of traffic on social media platform X referencing ‘Southport Muslim’ – in reference to an unevidenced claim about the attacker’s religion – came from the US with 30% coming from Britain.
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