Crowds and emotion at the funeral of a little girl killed in the Southport attack

The funeral of nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar took place on Sunday in Southport, in the northwest of England.

Hundreds of people gathered in Southport, northwest England, on Sunday, August 11, for the funeral of a nine-year-old girl killed in a knife attack that sparked a week of far-right riots in the United Kingdom. The crowd lined the streets and cheered as the small white coffin carrying the remains of Alice da Silva Aguiar passed by in a carriage pulled by two white horses.

Relatives and local officials attended a religious ceremony with the girl’s parents at a Catholic church in the traumatised coastal town near Liverpool. The public was asked to come dressed in white, following a Portuguese tradition, as the victim’s family is from the Madeira archipelago. Pink ribbons and balloons were hung from lampposts along the route of the funeral procession. The ceremony, broadcast outside by loudspeakers, included prayers and speeches, including one by the girl’s school headmistress, Jinnie Payne.

The stabbing took place on July 29 during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. The other two victims were Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, while eight children and two adults who were trying to protect them were injured, all of whom were released from hospital. Bebe’s parents, Lauren and Ben King, said in a statement Saturday that their lives had been cut short. “broken” by the death of their daughter “in an act of unimaginable violence”. They revealed that their eldest daughter, Genie, witnessed the attack and managed to escape.

The triple murder was followed by a week of racist and Islamophobic violence across England and Northern Ireland, fuelled by far-right agitators amid online rumours that the suspect, initially described as a Muslim asylum seeker, was in fact 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff, Wales, to a family that media reports say originated from Rwanda.