The missed opportunities to stop Southport triple killer Axel Rudakubana

21 January 2025, 10:54 | Updated: 21 January 2025, 15:38

Southport attacker Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class after authorities missed a string of opportunities to identify the risk he posed to others.

A public inquiry has been announced and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he will not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure, which he said "leaps off the page".

Rudakubana faces a life sentence after pleading guilty to murdering Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, in the Merseyside town on 29 July last year.

He was referred three times to the government's anti-extremism programme and had contact with police, the courts, the justice system and mental health services in the years before the mass stabbing.

Schools

Rudakubana, now 18, first became known to officials in 2019, initially because of his anxiety and social isolation, then due to his troubling behaviour.

He took a knife into Range High School, in Formby, in October 2019, leading to him being expelled, before returning to attack a child with a hockey stick two months later.

The teenager went on to attend two specialist schools, The Acorns School in Lancashire and Presfield High School and Specialist College in Southport - where his attendance was less than 1% - and teachers were concerned about his behaviour.

He struggled to re-integrate into school following his exclusion, according to the Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership, which said "this was exacerbated by the pandemic".

Mental health services noted he was experiencing anxiety which prevented him from leaving his home.

Police

Police had repeated contact with the teenager between the knife incident and May 2022, including responding to five calls from his home in Banks, Lancashire, over concerns about his behaviour.

Each time, officers made vulnerable child referrals to multi-agency safeguarding hub staff, who are meant to stop people from slipping through the net by sharing information indicating risk between different organisations.

An assessment suggested "early help", which is intended to support children and their families before the intervention of social workers, was needed.

He was convicted of the hockey stick assault and received a youth justice referral order - a measure where juveniles who plead guilty to their first offence are placed under supervision to try to stop them reoffending - which he completed in 2021 having "fully engaged", according to the safeguarding partnership.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Rudakubana also admitted to having carried a knife more than 10 times.

She said "the action against him was far too weak" and that he was "easily able" to order the kitchen knife he used to commit the attack - which had a 20cm blade - on Amazon.

Anti-extremism programme

He was referred to the government's Prevent anti-extremism scheme three times by schools, the first when he was just 13 years old in 2019 and twice more in 2021, after expressing interest in school shootings, the London Bridge attack, the IRA, MI5 and the Middle East.

Each time his case was assessed by counter-terror police, but he was not deemed a terrorism risk.

The home secretary said a Prevent "learning review" has found the referrals shouldn't have been closed but instead referred to the specialist Channel programme for intervention.

The review found "too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology without considering the vulnerabilities to radicalisation or taking account of whether he was obsessed with massacre or extreme violence," and the cumulative significance of the repeated referrals wasn't properly considered.

Rudakubana was charged with an offence of possessing a document likely to be useful for terrorism - a PDF entitled "Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual" - following a search of his home in the days after the Southport attack.

The charge, which he has also admitted, suggests he had the document as early as 29 August 2021, just months after his last Prevent referral in April of that year.

Obsession with violence and weapons

He is also understood to have possessed many other documents on violent subjects, including A Concise History Of Nazi Germany, The Myth Of The Remote Controlled Car Bomb and Amerindian Torture And Cultural Violence.

Pictures relating to wars and conflicts, including in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Korea, as well as images of knives and machetes, were discovered on his devices.

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Ricin was discovered in a plastic container under Rudakubana's bed, while a bag was also found which had contained castor seeds, used to make the poison, which had been bought in 2022.

Police also found a machete and a knife identical to the one used in the attack, in which eight other children aged between seven and 13, yoga instructor Leanne Lucas and businessman John Hayes were also injured.

A week earlier on 22 July, he tried to travel to his former high school as pupils broke up for the summer holidays, but his father followed him out of the house and pleaded with the taxi driver not to take him.

He was wearing the same outfit - a green hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and a surgical mask - that he wore when he travelled by taxi to the Hart Space where the stabbings took place.

Minutes before he left home he searched social media site X for information about a mass stabbing at a church in Sydney in 2024.

(c) Sky News 2025: The missed opportunities to stop Southport triple killer Axel Rudakubana