The teenager who killed three young girls and wounded 10 other people in a knife attack on a dance class in Southport, England, last summer will be sentenced on Thursday.
Judge Julian Goose, who is presiding over the case, told the attacker, Axel Rudakubana, 18, that a life sentence equivalent would be inevitable after he pleaded guilty on Monday.
Since that court hearing, a portrait of a deeply troubled young man obsessed with violence has emerged, as has the fact that he was on the radar of the local authorities for years before the July 29 knife attack in Southport, a town north of Liverpool.
After the attack, Britain was rattled by a series of riots as disinformation about the attacker’s identity swirled on social media and messaging apps. False claims that he was an undocumented immigrant or newly arrived asylum seeker were amplified by far-right agitators. Mr. Rudakubana is a British citizen who was born in Wales to parents originally from Rwanda.
At age 13 and 14, he was referred three times to Prevent, a British counterterrorism program, because of his fixation on violence, but those referrals were ultimately dropped because it was determined each time that he did not meet the threshold for intervention.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said from Downing Street on Tuesday that the attack was a sign that terrorism in the country was evolving, and that young people were being radicalized by “a tidal wave of violence freely available online.”
“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,” Mr. Starmer said, noting that some became “fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.”
Mr. Rudakubana was also convicted of a weapons charge for possession of the knife used in the attack, for production of a biological toxin and for “possessing information” described as “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” after investigators found ricin, a lethal toxin, and a PDF file titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual” in his home.
The judge will not be able to sentence him to a whole life order — a life sentence with the stipulation that the perpetrator should never be released from prison on parole — because he was just 17 at the time of the deadly attack.
In 2019, Mr. Rudakubana was expelled after he brought a knife to school and a few months later he returned to attack a student with a hockey stick. He was then enrolled in a school for children with specialized needs.
A local safeguarding agency said that he had struggled to integrate into the new school, and when the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020 and schools closed across Britain, his isolation deepened. He had been withdrawn from his family and the community long before the attack, and barely left home.
A week before the attack, Mr. Rudakubana tried to travel to his former high school, the police said, but his father ran out of the house and pleaded with the taxi driver not to take him. Eventually, the teenager returned to the house.
On July 29, though, he managed to travel by taxi to Hart Space, where a sold-out Taylor Swift-themed dance class for children ages 6 to 11 was underway during the summer break from school.
Mr. Rudakubana rampaged through the room crowded with 26 children, stabbing several of them. The injuries suffered by Bebe King, 6, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, were so severe that they died inside the building, the police said, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, ran outside with the other children but soon collapsed. She was taken to the hospital and died the next day. Eight other children and two adults were wounded in the attack.
The case has raised questions about how the authorities may have missed opportunities to stop the violence before it began. The government has said it will conduct a public inquiry into the case to better understand what happened and what needs to change. But the case has also highlighted the issue of young people fixated on extreme violence who gain access to online images and messages that drive that obsession.
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