Missed opportunities to stop Southport killer
Axel Rudakubana has been described by his former schoolfriend as “a ticking timebomb”.
Almost six months on from a knife rampage that left three young girls dead, Keir Starmer vowed today to leave “no stone unturned” as he launched an inquiry into the missed opportunities to stop Southport killer Axel Rudakubana - a man described by his former schoolfriend as “a ticking timebomb”.
Starmer acknowledged that “terrorism has changed” from threats posed by highly organised groups to acts of terror carried out by “loners”, often young men who’ve spend many hours a day in their bedroom watching extremely violent online material.
In the instance of 18 year-old Rudakubana, the government itself is under intense scrutiny after it emerged yesterday that he was referred to the government’s counter-terror programme, Prevent, three times before he carried out his deadly attack, but he didn’t meet its threshold for intervention.
What exactly do we know about the man who pleaded guilty on Monday to murdering Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva and and trying to kill 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on 29 July?
Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff and diagnosed with autism as a teenager, was the shy son of middle-class Christian parents, who moved to the UK from Rwanda in 2002.
Despite months of investigation, detectives say they are unable to identify any specific motive for why he conducted such a senseless attack.
Though that’s not to say he didn’t show any warning signs. According to investigators, he appears to have harboured a deep obsession with violence, having spent many hours watching graphic videos of murder online.
While investigators found an al-Qaeda training manual downloaded on his computer, his interest in violent groups appears to be broader and not tied to any specific ideology. He also spent hours researching the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and massacres conducted by Genghis Khan.
Rudakubana was expelled from his secondary school in 2019 after he admitted to taking a knife to school. He later returned armed with a hockey stick and attacked a pupil, breaking their wrist. He was given a youth justice referral order, requiring him to carry out a programme run by the local youth offending team which he completed a year later. This was also the incident that saw him first referred to Prevent, but he was deemed not a terrorism risk.
In the weeks before he went on his killing rampage at the Hart Space centre, five miles from his home, neighbours say they saw police cars outside the family’s house in the village of Banks “half a dozen” times.
Today, Sir Max Hill KC, the government's former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and director of public prosecutions, called for an overhaul of counter-terror strategy.
He warned against the “overuse of labels”, adding that too much focus on definitions of terrorism are a distraction from the truly important assessment: the level of threat an individual poses. A point that resonates in the case of a man who may not have been conforming to any specific extremist ideology, or expressing allegiance to a particular “terrorist” group, but was clearly showing signs of dangerously violent tendencies.
Though, as in many of these similarly tragic cases, even if Prevent hadn’t failed to identify the potential level of threat he posed, there are still no easy answers as to what would have been a successful long-term intervention to stop him from going on to commit such a heinous act.
Speaking in the Commons this afternoon, the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, placed a heavy focus on the “online ecosystem that is radicalising our children while safety measures are whittled away.”
Revealing that 162 people were referred to Prevent last year for concerns related to school massacres, and noting her deep disturbance at the number of cases involving teenage “obsession with violence and gore”, she vowed to hold tech companies accountable for the “ever more disturbing materials” that young people are being exposed to online.
“Companies should not be profiting from hosting content that puts children's lives at risk,” said Cooper. A sentiment most will resonate with. Fewer will feel persuaded that any government intervention is really capable of preventing the internet from feeding certain young individuals’ obsession with violence.
Especially following Meta’s recent scrapping of independent content moderators - a bold pro-free speech policy that Zuckerberg himself even admitted is a “tradeoff” that will result in more harmful content appearing on his platforms - Cooper is fighting an uphill battle.
During the public inquiry announced today, there will be many more questions for the authorities to answer on why - again - the British state has failed victims.
Caitlin Allen
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