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What really motivated Axel Rudakubana?

The Southport killer's guilty plea leaves the most important questions unanswered.

Luke Gittos

Luke Gittos
Columnist

Topics Politics UK

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Axel Rudakubana has pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last summer, a crime that left Britain understandably horrified and led to days of inexcusable rioting.

The 18-year-old had originally pleaded not guilty to all charges. But on what was due to be the first day of his trial at Liverpool Crown Court on Monday, he changed his pleas to guilty.

On 29 July last year, Rudakubana stabbed to death nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar, six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe in what the court described as a ‘meticulously planned rampage’. Two adults and eight children were also left seriously injured by his stabbing spree.

That the Crown will no longer have to prove his guilt is a mercy for the families of his victims. It means they will not have to relive the gruesome details of that awful day for potentially weeks and months on end. But the plea leaves the public with many questions that will no longer be answered in court. The most pressing of which is how the state missed the threat he posed.

Answering such questions is especially important given the history of this particular case. After all, this has been a case in which the absence of information has led to wild and often misleading speculation.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the shocking events of last summer, straight-forward lies circulated about the killer’s identity. It was claimed online that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived ‘by boat’ back in 2023. These claims included a completely false name. The appalling riots that followed the Southport massacre were in part prompted by such mendacious claims.

Part of the blame for this lies with the UK government. Its censorious and narrowly legalistic response to the attack, which limited what the public was allowed to know, created a vacuum in which wild theories and outright lies could flourish. All the authorities were prepared to say in the immediate aftermath of Rudakubana’s arrest was that the killings were ‘not being treated as terror-related’.

However, recent revelations suggest it was not unreasonable to suspect a terrorist motive. We now know that Rudakubana had downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual and had also attempted to produce Ricin, a biological toxin. Furthermore, since his guilty plea, it has emerged that he had been referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, on three separate occasions. He was first referred in 2019 when he was 13, and a further two referrals were made in 2021, all when he was a schoolboy living in Lancashire.

From this it is fair to infer that the attack could have been terror-related. Yet, seven months on, there is still no conclusive evidence as to Rudakubana’s motive. Indeed, the referrals to Prevent were born of concerns around his fascination with violence generally. He poured over materials on school shootings, wars and genocides. It is still not clear if he was attached to any particular ideology. He had been raised a Catholic and there is no evidence of any interest in Islamism, beyond the downloading of the al-Qaeda training manual.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has now ordered a public inquiry into the Southport attack. This may shed further light on what drove Rudakubana to commit this atrocity and how the state failed to stop him. But we are a long way from proving that he acted with a terrorist motive.

In fact, the most recent revelations about Rudakubana’s behaviour in the months and years before the killings suggest an even more disturbing possibility – namely, that he was motivated by a self-pitying sense of grievance.

It has been reported that, in the days before the massacre, Rudakubana’s father had to stop him from returning to his former school armed with a kitchen knife. He had originally been excluded from Range High School in Formby in October 2019, and had been calling Childline at the time to claim he was being ‘racially bullied’. After his exclusion, he returned to the school in December 2019 with a hockey stick and assaulted a pupil, breaking his or her wrist. A teacher was forced to restrain him. His desire, five years later, to return to the school again, this time with a knife, suggests that he was a young man ready to commit mass murder in response to allegedly being bullied. This was just a week before he carried out the attack in Southport.

This looks less like a terror attack and more like an act of murderous self-pity. This would hardly be far-fetched. Last year, 15-year-old Elianne Andam was stabbed to death in broad daylight in Croydon, south London, after an argument over a teddy bear left her killer, 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu, feeling humiliated. In 2018, 25-year-old Harry Uzoka was stabbed to death by 24-year-old George Koh after the pair fell out over a girl. Koh was also said to have felt humiliated.

All too often, knife-related murders involving young people are motivated by little more than hurt feelings and bruised egos. In our feelings-obsessed culture, where emotions are privileged above all else, it seems some young people feel justified in responding violently and even murderously to sleights.

Perhaps Southport will eventually be categorised as a terrorist incident. But it may well turn out that at the centre of this horrific case was another young man who thought it was acceptable to respond to his sense of hurt and victimisation with an act of unspeakable violence.

As more details emerge, we must demand a proper, open discussion about Southport. One that takes the public seriously. Otherwise, we will never get to the bottom of what led to this truly evil crime.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. He is the author of Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.

Picture by: Merseyside Police.

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