Southport dance teacher: ‘We just lost faith in the world’ after fatal attack

Leanne Lucas, who regularly ran classes at the venue where the attack happened, said it had left the victims and their families ‘connected by an invisible piece of string’. Photograph: Facebook

A dance teacher who survived the knife attack in Southport in which three children were killed has said she is hoping her voice “will get louder and louder” after the trial of her alleged attacker.

Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were killed in an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July, and 10 other people were injured, eight of them children.