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Europe|A U.K. Teen Became Fixated on Extreme Violence. But Was it Terrorism?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/world/europe/southport-terrorism-prevent-violence-rudakubana.html
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Axel Rudakubana, who killed three girls in a stabbing spree at a dance class, was obsessed with violence but had no known ideology. His case has led to calls for a rethink of counterterror strategy.
By Lizzie Dearden
Reporting from Liverpool, England
Jan. 30, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
On Oct. 4, 2019, a 13-year-old British boy called a child welfare hotline from his home in Banks, a village in northwest England, and asked: “What should I do if I want to kill somebody?”
The teenager, Axel Rudakubana, said that he had started taking a knife to school because he was being bullied. After counselors from the hotline called the police, he told officers that he thought that he would use the weapon if he became angry.
It was the first of several warnings about Mr. Rudakubana, now 18, and his increasingly violent tendencies. But five years after that call, on July 29 last year, he was able to commit one of the worst attacks on children in recent British history, murdering three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, a town near Banks, and attempting to kill eight other children and two adults who tried to protect them.
Last week Mr. Rudakubana was sentenced to life in prison, bringing a small degree of closure to the atrocity that provoked outrage across Britain. In other ways, however, the reckoning has only begun, as the country faces profound questions raised by the attack.
How did he slip through the nets of multiple agencies — including a counterterrorism initiative called Prevent, to which he was referred three times? How should the authorities deal with young people who become fixated on violence for its own sake, rather than in service of Islamist or other extremist ideologies, and who access a torrent of graphic content and encouragement online? And do laws crafted in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, “need to change to recognize this new and dangerous threat,” as the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, suggested last week?
‘Poisonous Online Extremism’
In police interviews, Mr. Rudakubana refused to give any motive for his knife attack. The ensuing riots that broke out across England were fueled by false claims that it was an act of Islamist terrorism committed by a recently arrived undocumented migrant.
