LONDON (AP) — Six months after a teenage attacker stabbed three girls at a children’s dance class in England, up-to-date details about his background have raised questions about why authorities repeatedly failed to recognize the threat he posed.
Officials revealed this week that 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana had been convicted of assault at school, was obsessed with violence and had referred himself to counterterrorism officials multiple times before his attack shocked the nation.
But the government said officials did not classify him as a solemn threat because the teenager did not fit existing notions of terrorism – he was a loner who showed no clear affiliation with an extremist ideology or an organized group.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this showed the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy needed a complete rethink.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced an investigation into why several state authorities failed to recognize the threat posed by Rudakubana.
“How did he fall through so many gaps? “It’s just unbearable to think that something more could and should have been done,” she said.
Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all charges on Monday and will be sentenced on Thursday.
Here’s a look at his case and what warning signs were missed:
Who is Rudakubana and what happened last year?
Rudakubana was born in Wales to Rwandan immigrants.
He pleaded guilty this week to murdering three girls aged 6 to 9 and attempting to murder 10 other people at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class for children in the northern English town of Southport on July 29.
The killings sparked a week of widespread unrest across the United Kingdom after the suspect was mistakenly identified as an asylum seeker who had recently arrived in Britain by boat.
Rudakubana was also charged with producing a biological toxin – ricin – and possessing a document described as an “al-Qaeda training manual.”
Police searched his home and found documents on his devices about Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide and car bombs.
Was he on the authorities’ radar?
Officials say Rudakubana has had multiple contacts with authorities in the past.
In 2019, he was found guilty of attacking another child at school with a hockey stick and was placed under supervision by a teenage offenders team, separate from the police and part of the local government.
He was referred to the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, three times – once in December 2019, when he was 13, and twice in 2021. The referrals followed suggestions that he had an interest in school shootings, the 2017 London Bridge attack and the Irish Republican Army and the Middle East, Cooper said.
His case was examined by the anti-terrorism police, but each time the case was closed without further action.
During the same period, local police were called to his home five times over unspecified concerns about his behavior.
He received psychological and educational support, but later appeared to have stopped cooperating with social workers. He was expelled from one school after bringing a knife and was absent from another for an extended period of time.
What went wrong?
The case highlighted that official policy had not kept pace with the “changing nature of terrorism,” Starmer said.
Unlike highly organized groups with a clear political ideology or motive like the Islamic State, up-to-date threats have emerged from “extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits and young men in their bedrooms, accessing all sorts of material online and becoming desperate to strive for fame.” said the Prime Minister.
An initial review of Rudakubana’s case by the Interior Ministry found that repeated references to the anti-extremism program were not adequately taken into account because “too much emphasis 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 motivated extremism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and have failed to address it clearly Tackling Surge Over the last decade, teenage people have found themselves drawn to extreme online violence.
“In the last five years or so, (governments) have had to shift to this non-ideological, more diffuse, nihilistic form of violence that falls outside the scope of counterterrorism,” Rose said.
People under 18 accounted for 57% of all referrals to the government’s Prevent program in 2023 and 2024. This is the highest proportion since 2016, when the data was first collected.
What changes have been proposed?
Starmer suggested terrorism laws may need to be revised to cover non-ideological youth violence, but this was met with mixed reactions from experts.
Meanwhile, the government has pledged to change the law to require retailers to ask anyone buying a knife for two forms of identification.
Officials said Rudakubana admitted carrying knives and had previously shown clear intent to exploit them. Despite his conviction for assault, he was able to easily order a knife from Amazon and carry out his killing spree.
Online safety laws have also recently been introduced for press and technology companies and social media platforms to regulate extremist and violent content and reduce the risk to users, especially children and teenage people.
But “for young people who want to seek out this type of content and are relatively tech-savvy, it’s not hard to find these places to engage,” said Stuart Macdonald, a law professor who studies online extremism at the Studied at Swansea University.
“The challenge for the regulator will be to take enforcement action against these more obscure platforms when they are difficult to identify and difficult to contact,” he said.
