The teenager had become increasingly withdrawn, even from his family. He rarely left his home, a red brick house on a quiet cul-de-sac in the village of Banks, near the west coast of England.
Alone with his thoughts, he scrolled endlessly through online images and descriptions of war, torture and death, feeding an obsession with genocide and killing.
And then, on a bright morning last summer, Axel Rudakubana took a taxi to a children’s dance class in Southport, England. Knife in hand, he rampaged through a crowded room where girls on their summer break had gathered to dance to Taylor Swift and make friendship bracelets. He murdered three of them, and he wounded eight other children and two adults.
In the months since the July 29 attack, the police and prosecutors have worked to retrace the steps leading up to the killing spree, which horrified Britain. They interviewed witnesses, examined hours of CCTV and reviewed thousands of documents, downloads and messages from Mr. Rudakubana’s devices.
On Monday, after Mr. Rudakubana, now 18, pleaded guilty to murder and other charges related to the Southport attack, restrictions on reporting about his case were lifted.
The picture that has emerged, while still limited, is of a deeply troubled individual whose fascination with violence was brought to the authorities’ attention when he was just 13, and who had been known to a number of state agencies for years.
“It is clear that this was a young man with a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence,” Ursula Doyle, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for the Mersey-Cheshire region, said outside the courtroom where Mr. Rudakubana entered his guilty plea. “He has shown no sign of remorse.”
As the details of Mr. Rudakubana’s interactions with local agencies came into focus on Monday, it became clear that the authorities may have missed opportunities to stop the violence before it began. He had been referred three times to Prevent, a counterterrorism program, when he was 13 and 14 because of his fixation on violence, the government confirmed on Monday. He had also come into contact with the police, the courts, social services and mental health services in the years before the attack.
Yvette Cooper, Britain’s home secretary, said in a statement that the agencies had “failed to identify the terrible risk and danger to others that he posed.” She announced a public inquiry to determine “the truth about what happened and what needs to change.”
Ms. Cooper said the information about Mr. Rudakubana’s previous referrals to the authorities could not have been made public before his conviction. Strict rules govern the release of information during active court proceedings in Britain in order to guarantee the right to a fair trial.
The police found ricin, a lethal toxin, in Mr. Rudakubana’s house, as well as a PDF file titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual.” But his online history showed a wide interest in conflict, terrorism and genocide, and there was no evidence that he subscribed to a single political or religious ideology, according to the Merseyside Police.
Instead, they said, he seemed to have been driven simply by a desire to commit violence.
“Although we will never know why he did it, what we can say is that he was a man with an unhealthy obsession with extreme violence,” Serena Kennedy, the chief constable of the Merseyside Police, said in a statement.
“We know that he had researched numerous documents online which show that obsession. What we can say is that, from all those documents, no one ideology was uncovered, and that is why this was not treated as terrorism.”
‘Unwilling to leave the house’
Mr. Rudakubana was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 2006 to parents who were originally from Rwanda. They moved to the Southport area in 2013; at the time of the attack, the family was living in Banks, a small village nearby. His father, Alphonse Rudakubana, had moved to Britain in 1996 in the wake of Rwanda’s genocide, according to a 2015 profile in the Southport Visiter, a local paper.
In interviews soon after Mr. Rudakubana’s arrest last year, residents of Banks, which is home to about 4,400 people, said he had mingled little with the community.
During a pretrial hearing in Liverpool in August, a prosecutor told the court that Mr. Rudakubana had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, adding that he had been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time.”
For a while, Mr. Rudakubana seemed to have an interest in acting and was represented by a talent agency, even playing Doctor Who in a BBC advertisement in 2018 when he was 11 years old. But by the end of the following year, he was on the authorities’ radar.
In October 2019, he brought a knife into his school, according to a statement on Monday from the Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership, which oversees child protection in the area.
He was subsequently expelled from the school, which the BBC identified as Range High School in Formby. An administrator there declined a request to comment. Owais Patel, 18, a resident of Banks, told The New York Times soon after the attack that it was widely known among young people in the village that Mr. Rudakubana had been expelled for bringing a weapon to school.
A number of agencies became involved after that incident, according to the safeguarding partnership, which said Mr. Rudakubana had experienced “increasing anxiety and social isolation” and had developed “some challenging behaviors.”
In December 2019, Mr. Rudakubana returned to the school with a hockey stick and physically assaulted a student, the agency said.
At least three times between December 2019 and April 2021, education providers referred Mr. Rudakubana to Prevent, the counterterrorism program, the head of counterterrorism policing said on Monday. Created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Prevent tries to intervene in the lives of people suspected of being vulnerable to radicalization, with the hope of diverting them from possible terrorism.
But each time, it was determined that he did not meet the threshold for intervention, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday. That judgment “was clearly wrong” and failed the victims’ families, he said. He announced a review into whether the law needed to change to reflect the new threat posed by extremists like Mr. Rudakubana who do not subscribe to any particular ideology.
After his expulsion, Mr. Rudakubana was enrolled at the Acorns School in Lancashire, which caters to children with special needs, and at Presfield High School and Specialist College. But he struggled to integrate, the safeguarding agency said, a situation that worsened after the pandemic began in 2020 and schools closed. Despite professionals’ efforts to engage with him, he “continued to face challenges related to his emotional and behavioral well-being, social interactions and education,” the agency said, and his attendance was limited.
‘Savagery and senselessness’
On July 22, Mr. Rudakubana booked a taxi to take him to Range High School, according to a local police official. But his father ran outside and pleaded with the driver not to take him, and eventually Mr. Rudakubana returned to the house. CCTV footage showed him wearing the same hooded sweatshirt and mask that he would wear a week later, during the Southport attack. No more information was provided on the incident.
On that morning of the attack, two teachers set up a room at Hart Space, a yoga and community studio in Southport. They laid out a station for bracelet making and an area for yoga, and they lined up a playlist of Taylor Swift songs, ready for the 26 youngsters who arrived around 10 a.m. The class had been advertised on an Instagram account and had quickly sold out.
As the class neared its end, just before noon, Mr. Rudakubana arrived in a taxi and walked into the building, where he stabbed to death Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9. Eight other children were wounded, along with Leanne Lucas, the organizer of the event, who tried to shield the children, and John Hayes, a businessman who worked nearby and who tried to tackle Mr. Rudakubana.
After the attack, detailed examinations of Mr. Rudakubana’s digital devices revealed images related to wars and conflict around the world, including victims of torture and graphic descriptions of killings.
On Thursday, he will appear in Liverpool Crown Court for his sentencing. The judge presiding over his case has indicated that he will face life in prison.
Speaking outside the courtroom on Monday, Ms. Doyle, the deputy prosecutor, said the attack had left “an enduring mark on our community and the nation for its savagery and senselessness.”
But she expressed relief that Mr. Rudakubana’s guilty plea, which had not been expected, meant the families of the victims would be spared the pain of reliving their ordeal at a trial.
“Most of all,” she said, “we think of Elsie, Bebe, and Alice — the three beautiful young girls whose lives were cut short — and wish strength and courage to the families who loved and cherished them.”
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