2 hours ago
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A taxi driver who took the Southport killer to the scene of the attack has said he regrets not phoning the police sooner.
Gary Poland, who did not phone police until 50 minutes after the attack, said he feared a gunman was at large and that he would be a target.
The inquiry at Liverpool town hall heard Poland, a driver for One Call Taxis, drove Axel Rudakubana from his family home in Banks, Lancashire, to a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Hart Street, Southport, on 29 July 2024, where Rudakubana proceeded to kill six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar, and injure a further 10 people before being arrested.
Poland told the inquiry on Thursday that he regretted not immediately contacting authorities or helping the children at the scene. He picked up another passenger and returned home before phoning police roughly 50 minutes after the attack.
In a statement read to the inquiry, Poland said: “I consider that I should have called police earlier. In hindsight, I wish I had done and it’s something that I do think about every day, what I should have done and how this is my fault because I drove him there.
“I should have checked on the welfare of the children and helped.
“I thought there was a gunman shooting at people and I believed this to be the person who I had just been shouting at to pay me a fare and threatened to call the police, so I did believe that I was in danger of being a target.
“I regret not helping the children. Their screams were harrowing and I can still hear them when I think back to that day.”
He said he was in “complete shock”, which is why he did not check on the children’s welfare.
In a statement, he said: “This was terrifying. I was in a state of complete mortal terror and shock.”
The inquiry heard that Poland, who appeared via video call, rang a friend who worked nearby a minute after leaving Hart Street to ask if he had heard gunshots. A transcript shown to the inquiry of their call showed that Poland believed that Rudakubana, who used the name Simon while booking the taxi, had “just fucking shot everyone”.
Poland told the inquiry that, had he known Rudakubana was armed with a knife instead of a gun, he would have intervened to stop his attack, saying: “If I’d have thought he had a knife I’d have got out and disarmed him.”
When asked by counsel to the inquiry Nicholas Moss KC: “You would have got out and disarmed him, you think?” Poland responded that he would have, saying: “Yeah. It’s only a knife.”
When asked by Moss if he had “realised immediately this was a very serious incident” Poland replied that he had, but did not want to confront a suspected gunman.
Moss then asked Poland if he had seen any children running from the building and looked into his rear view mirror as he drove away, which he admitted he did, but said: “I did not know anybody was injured. I did not see anybody injured.”
In another part of his statement, Poland described the “extremely vivid” screaming of the children, and said he “saw a mass huddle of children aged approximately six or seven. They were screaming, it was like a stampede for their lives”.
Poland told the inquiry that after phoning his friend he accidentally accepted another passenger on his booking app, and took them on in his continued state of shock.
Transcripts of their conversation show that Poland and the passenger engaged in “mundane” conversations about the weather and work, before the passenger pointed out a police car driving quickly in the opposite direction. When his passenger expressed interest in where it was going, Poland simply replied: “He’s in a rush, isn’t he?”.
Moss said after dropping off his customer he could then have called police.
The inquiry continues.
