Southport child killer Axel Rudakubana gets 52 years in prison. But did UK miss red flags?

The tragedy in UK’s Southport in July 2024 left many shaken.

Though teenage assailant Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for the murder of three girls, some are asking if the UK authorities should have flagged him as a threat.

After all, Rudakubana, 18, had a history of violence and was even referred to counter-terrorism officials.

On Monday, the first day of his trial, Rudakubana pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

But what did the authorities know about him? Did they miss red flags on Rudakubana?

Let’s take a closer look:

What did the authorities know?

First, let’s take a brief look at Rudakubana.

He was born in Cardiff, Wales to immigrants from Rwanda.

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As per PA Media, his family later moved to Lancashire.

They stayed in a three-bedroom house and neighbours called then “unremarkable”.

However, according to BBC, the warning signs about Rudakubana were there from the start.

Rudakubana during his adolescence displayed anger issues and violent tendencies.

His fellow students said he was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.

He was expelled from high school in October 2019 after bringing a knife .

He claimed he was bullied.

Two months later, Rudakubana returned to the school with a hockey stick.

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He beat another child and had to be pulled off by staff.

As per BBC, Rudakubana was convicted of assault – after which he was sent for rehabilitation to youth justice service.

However, the police “several” interactions with Rudakubana from October 2019 to 2022.

This included four calls from his parents about his behaviour.

The police then contacted MASH – local agencies looking out for the vulnerable.

Children’s Social Care then did an assessment into Rudakubana – and determined that found social work support was not necessary. It instead recommended “early help” – aless intensive intervention.

Rudakubana and his family were offered help for his “emotional wellbeing and behaviours”.

However, by February 2023 he “stopped engaging.”

As per Sky News, Rudakubana, in the 17-month-period before the stabbing, was also referred to the government’s anti-extremism Prevent programme three times.

People under 18 accounted for 5 per cent of all referrals to the government’s Prevent program in 2023 and 2024.

That’s the highest proportion since 2016, when data was first collected.

However, it was decided that Rudakubana did not need intervention from the authorities.

Neighbours told BBC that police as saying that the police repeatedly visited Rudakubana’s home in the months before the Southport attack.

The Independent quoted home secretary Yvette Cooper as saying that Rudakubana “contact with a range of different state agencies throughout his teenage years” prior to “meticulously planned rampage”.

“He was referred three times to the Prevent programme between December 2019 and April 2021 aged 13 and 14.

“He also had contact with the police, the courts, the Youth Justice system, social services and mental health services. “Yet between them, those agencies failed to identify the terrible risk and danger to others that he posed.”

As per The Independent, Rudakubana, a week before the fatal attack, called a taxi to take him to his old high school.

He was even wearing the same outfit he would wear one week later – a green hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

He would have reached the school on the last day of term as the students were leaving.

However, his father stopped him from leaving and begged the taxi driver not to take him.

Police after the Southport attack found disturbing images and documents on Rudakubana’s devices.

This includes photos from the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Korea and information about war and genocide.

Rudakubana was also reading up about Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Somalia and Rwanda, and slavery.

Police also found an academic study of an al-Qaeda training manual.

It had been downloaded at least twice since 2021.

Before Rudakubana carried out the attack in Southport, he searched the social media platform X for the 2024 Sydney church attack, in which six people were stabbed.

What do experts say?

An initial Home Office review into Rudakubana’s case found that the repeated referrals to the anti-extremism program were not properly considered because “too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology.”

Hannah Rose, a hate and extremism analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, said many Western countries have focused on ideological or politically driven extremism since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and neglected to tackle a marked rise in the past decade of young people drawn to extreme violence online.

“In the past five years or so (governments) have had to pivot to this non-ideological, more diffuse, nihilistic form of violence, which doesn’t fall into counterterrorism frameworks,” Rose said.

Starmer has admitted that the UK needs to re-examine the way it looks at counter-terrorism.

“In the past, the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent. Groups like al Qaeda. That threat, of course, remains,” Starmer was quoted as saying by Sky News.

“But now, alongside that, we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence seeming only for its own sake.”

The case highlighted how official policies had not caught up with how “terrorism has changed,” Starmer said.

Unlike highly organised groups with a clear political ideology or motive like the Islamic State organisation, new threats have emerged from “extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety,” the prime minister said.

Starmer suggested that terrorism laws may need to be revised to cover non-ideological youth violence, but that has been met with mixed reactions by experts.

Meanwhile, the government has pledged to change the law so that retailers will need to ask anyone buying a knife for two forms of identification.

But “for young people who want to seek out this type of content and are relatively tech savvy, it’s not difficult to find these spaces where they can engage,” said Stuart Macdonald, a professor of law who studies online extremism at Swansea University.

“The challenge for the regulator will be how to take enforcement action against these more obscure platforms when they’re difficult to identify and difficult to contact,” he said.

Rudakubana pleaded guilty this week to murdering three girls, ages 6 to 9, and attempting to murder 10 other people on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class for children in the northern English town of Southport.

Rudakubana was also charged with production of a biological toxin.

The killings triggered a week of widespread rioting across the UK after the suspect was falsely identified as an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain by boat.

With inputs from agencies