A judge chairing the public inquiry into the 2023 Nottingham attacks has demanded Nottinghamshire Police apologise after the force failed to disclose notebooks belonging to killer Valdo Calocane, which contained lists of bomb-making ingredients and references to the Manchester Arena bombing. The notebooks were found at Calocane's home after he stabbed three people to death but were withheld for three years, only surfacing recently when lawyers for the bereaved families spotted a reference in a police statement. This matters because the material was never given to prosecutors or to the psychiatrists who assessed Calocane's culpability, meaning it played no part in the decision to accept a manslaughter plea by diminished responsibility rather than pursue a murder trial, a decision that angered victims' families.

Her Honour Deborah Taylor pressed the force's barrister, John Beggs KC, on why the failure had not been addressed in closing submissions, reminding him of an earlier warning about "frankness and candour"; Beggs admitted he could not justify or mitigate the lapse and offered an apology on the force's behalf. The inquiry into the deaths of students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, both 19, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65, has already exposed multiple failings, including police not arresting Calocane despite an outstanding violence warrant and the NHS discharging him after he was sectioned four times. Beggs argued the attacks could not reasonably have been foreseen despite at least ten prior police contacts with Calocane, blaming underfunding and a national mental health crisis, though he conceded mistakes had been made.