How did the Southport killer slip through the cracks?

Axel Rudakubana didn’t appear out of nowhere.

At the moment when he committed the brutal murders of three young girlsthe teenager was well known to the police, anti-extremist authorities and several other public agencies.

But despite repeated concerns about Rudakubana’s taste for violence, intervention has only ever been limited.

The government now says several opportunities were missed to stop him from carrying out his dark obsessions. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has declared the state bankrupt.

This is what we know about his journey to becoming a killer – and whether it could have been avoided.

The first serious signs that Rudakubana was capable of causing damage came from when he was in year 9 at Range High School in Formby, Merseyside.

At the age of 11, he appeared in a BBC Children In Need campaign video, for which he was put forward by a casting agency.

But during his teenage years, Rudakubana began to exhibit anger issues and a propensity for violence. His comrades remember his obsession with figures such as Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.

His time at Range High School ended in October 2019 when he brought a knife to school. It would later emerge that he told the Childline call center that he had done so because he had been the victim of racist bullying.

Rudakubana did not use the knife on this occasion, but the incident was serious enough for him to be permanently expelled from school.

He returned to school about two months later with a hockey stick and attacked another child with it. He had to be restrained by staff.

From the time he was expelled from Range High School, Rudakubana largely fell outside the formal education system.

Local health workers determined he had autism spectrum disorder and he was subsequently enrolled in two other schools for children with special needs: The Acorns School and Presfield High School & Specialist College.

He only attended the latter’s sixth grade for a few days and was treated largely through home visits. The school sometimes asked police to accompany teachers when they visited him at home, such were concerns over his violent behavior.

The Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership said Rudakubana had failed to “reintegrate” into education following his exclusion from Range High School, a situation “exacerbated by the pandemic”. His participation, they said, was “limited.”

Around the same time, it was noted that Rudakubana was experiencing “anxiety that prevented him from leaving his home.”

During the years he was out of school, several local agencies had contact at various levels with Rudakubana.

He was convicted of assault and referred to the juvenile justice service after the incident where he took a knife into the school. He carried out rehabilitation activities with young offenders who pleaded guilty to a first offense.

However, Lancashire Police had “several” further interactions with the teenager between October 2019 and May 2022 – including four calls from his home regarding concerns about his behavior.

Each time, officers contacted MASH, a local grouping of agencies responsible for monitoring vulnerable people in the area.

Children’s Social Services carried out an initial assessment in Rudakubana, which found that social work support was not necessary. It recommends “early help,” which covers less intensive forms of intervention.

Contact was made with Rudakubana and his family and they were given advice on his “emotional wellbeing and behaviours”.

He worked with local mental health services, but “stopped engaging” in February 2023.

A spokesperson representing local agencies said his “participation and engagement remained a challenge” throughout this period, despite efforts by professionals to engage with him.

An independent review to determine whether additional response measures could have been taken is underway.

Rudakubana’s twisted interest in violence began to emerge before and after the Southport attack on July 29, 2024.

He came to the attention of the government’s anti-extremism program Prevent because he expressed interest in school shootings, the London Bridge attack, the IRA, MI5 and the Middle East.

He was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021 due to concerns about his interest in violence.

The extent of his obsessions became clearer after the attack when his home and digital devices were searched.

Police discovered that his devices contained images of the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Korea, as well as numerous academic documents relating to war and genocide.

His research revealed an interest in Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Somalia and Rwanda, and slavery.

Detectives also discovered a US academic study into an Al Qaeda training document, which had been downloaded at least twice since 2021.

These twisted interests form the backdrop to the horror that was to unfold on July 29.

On July 7, an ad was posted on Instagram advertising a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop for young children. It sold out in 11 days.

The class started at 10:00 BST and photos taken at the scene and examined by police show 26 children laughing and playing at the start of the school holidays.

At 11:10 a.m., Rudakubana left his home. His face was hidden by a hood and a surgical mask.

He was carrying a 20 cm long kitchen knife purchased on Amazon on July 13. Police say he used encryption software to conceal his identity when he purchased it.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called it a “disgrace” that a teenager with a history of violence could easily acquire the blade. Amazon says it has opened an urgent investigation.

Shortly before leaving the house, Rudakubana deleted his IP address from his tablet, one of several pieces of evidence uncovered by police revealing he had made efforts to conceal his online movements. He also sought information about the assassination of a bishop in Sydney in April 2024.

A taxi came to pick him up at 11:30 a.m. and he remained silent the whole way.

He left the car without paying and headed to a garage. The driver followed him and there was a confrontation.

When the mechanic told him to pay for his fare, Rudakubana replied: “What are you going to do about it?

Fifteen minutes later, he was inside the dance studio and began stabbing at will.

Its target – the most vulnerable people in society, young children – seemed to have been chosen to arouse maximum horror and disgust.

Rudakubana killed Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine. He attempted to kill others by stabbing them in the back as they fled.

By 11:59 a.m. he had been arrested but said nothing when formally questioned by police.

In the days and weeks following the Southport attack, it became clear to investigators that Rudakubana was intent on causing carnage and death, fueled by his wide-ranging obsessions with human suffering.

When police searched his home, they found a cache of weapons, including a machete, a set of arrows and a sealed box containing an unknown substance. Tests carried out at Porton Down, the government’s biological warfare laboratory, confirmed the substance was ricin, a poison for which there is no cure. There is no evidence that he ever deployed it.

It also emerged that a week before the murders, Rudakubana had attempted to return to Range High School, the site of his expulsion five years earlier.

He wore the same hooded sweatshirt and surgical mask he would wear during the attack the following week, but he was prevented from making the trip when his father begged a taxi driver not to ‘take away.

It is unclear whether Rudakubana intended to attack people that day, but his movements bear a striking similarity to the events of the following week. The second time he made sure to book the taxi after leaving the house.

The amount of information known before the murders about Rudakubana’s violent obsessions raised serious questions about whether more could have been done to stop him – in particular, whether Prevent could have acted.

Despite the three referrals regarding Rudakubana, it was established that concerns about him were never escalated, meaning he was not subject to enhanced surveillance.

An urgent Prevent review carried out over the summer found this was because, although there was evidence of his obsession with violence, he did not appear to fit the mold of a potential extremist.

There was no sign of allegiance to any one cause – which is why, although he pleaded guilty to downloading a terrorist manual, his case was never treated as a terrorism investigation.

His case has raised concerns about whether Prevent is equipped to identify dangerous people who don’t fit the traditional view of what constitutes an extremist.

The urgent review found that, given Rudakubana’s age and complex needs, his case should have been escalated. He concluded that Prevent placed too much emphasis on its apparent lack of adherence to a single radical ideology.

The Home Secretary said the “cumulative significance” of Rudakubana’s three repeated removals had “not been properly considered” by Prevent, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said it was ” clearly false” that it was not considered to meet the program’s intervention threshold.

A wider review of the Prevent program is underway.

Rudakubana will be sentenced for his crimes on Thursday – but the questions posed by his descent into violence will haunt for years to come.