LONDON — (AP) — Six months after a teenage attacker stabbed three girls to death at a children's dance class in England, new details about his background have sparked questions about how authorities repeatedly failed to spot the threat he posed.
Officials revealed this week that Axel Rudakubana, 18, had been convicted of assault at school, was obsessed with violence and referred to counterterrorism officials multiple times before his attack shocked the nation.
But the government said that because the teen did not fit into existing ways of understanding terrorism — he was a loner who did not show a clear adherence to an extremist ideology or an organized group — officials did not flag him as a serious threat.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that shows how Britain's counterterrorism strategy needs a complete rethink.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced an inquiry into why multiple state agencies failed to identify the danger that Rudakubana posed.
“How did he fall through so many gaps? It is just unbearable to think that something more could and should have been done,” she said.
Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all charges on Monday and will be sentenced Thursday.
Here's a look at his case and what warning signs were missed:
Rudakubana was born in Wales to Rwandan immigrants.
He pleaded guilty this week to murdering three girls, ages 6 to 9, and attempting to murder 10 other people on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class for children in the northern English town of Southport.
The killings triggered a week of widespread rioting across the U.K. after the suspect was falsely identified as an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain by boat.
Rudakubana was also charged with production of a biological toxin — ricin — and possessing a document described as an "al-Qaida training manual.”
Police searching his home found documents about Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide and car bombs on his devices.
Officials say Rudakubana had multiple contacts with authorities in the past.
In 2019 he was convicted of assaulting another child at school with a hockey stick and was placed under supervision by a youth offending team, which is separate from the police and was part of the local government.
He was referred to the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, three times — once in December 2019, when he was 13, and twice in 2021. The referrals followed evidence that he had expressed interest in school shootings, the 2017 London Bridge attack, the Irish Republican Army and the Middle East, Cooper said.
His case was assessed by counterterrorism police, but each time the referral was closed without further action.
During the same period, local police were called to his home five times over unspecified concerns about his behavior.
He was given mental health and educational support, but later appeared to have stopped engaging with social workers. He was expelled from one school after he brought in a knife, and had long periods of absence from another.
The case highlighted how official policies had not caught up with how “terrorism has changed,” Starmer said.
Unlike highly organized groups with a clear political ideology or motive like the Islamic State organization, new threats have emerged from “extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety," the prime minister said.
An initial Home Office review into Rudakubana's case found that the repeated referrals to the anti-extremism program were not properly considered because “too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology."
Hannah Rose, a hate and extremism analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, said many Western countries have focused on ideological or politically driven extremism since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and neglected to tackle a marked rise in the past decade of young people drawn to extreme violence online.
“In the past five years or so (governments) have had to pivot to this non-ideological, more diffuse, nihilistic form of violence, which doesn't fall into counterterrorism frameworks,” Rose said.
People under 18 accounted for 57% of all referrals to the government's Prevent program in 2023 and 2024. That’s the highest proportion since 2016, when data was first collected.
Starmer suggested that terrorism laws may need to be revised to cover non-ideological youth violence, but that has been met with mixed reactions by experts.
Meanwhile, the government has pledged to change the law so that retailers will need to ask anyone buying a knife for two forms of identification.
Officials said Rudakubana had admitted carrying knives and showed clear intent to use them previously. Despite his assault conviction he was able to easily order a knife from Amazon and carry out his rampage.
Online safety laws were also recently introduced to press tech companies and social media platforms to regulate extremist and violent content and reduce the risk to users, especially children and teens.
But "for young people who want to seek out this type of content and are relatively tech savvy, it’s not difficult to find these spaces where they can engage,” said Stuart Macdonald, a professor of law who studies online extremism at Swansea University.
“The challenge for the regulator will be how to take enforcement action against these more obscure platforms when they’re difficult to identify and difficult to contact," he said.
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