On October 4, 2019, a 13-year-old British boy called a hotline for the well-being of children from his home in Banks, a village in the north-west of England, and asked: “What should I do if I want to kill someone?”
The teenager, Axel Rudakubana, said he had started taking a knife at school because he had been a bullied victim. After the Hotline consultants called the police, he told the officers who thought he would use the weapon if he had angry.
He was the first of numerous warnings about Mr. Rudakubana, now 18, and his increasingly violent trends. But five years after that call, on July 29 last year, he was able to commit one of the worst attacks on the children of recent British history, killing three girls in a Taylor Swift -themed dance lesson in Southport, a city nearby At Banks and trying to kill eight more children and two adults who tried to protect them.
Last week Mr. Rudakubana was sentenced to life imprisonment, bringing a small degree of closure to the atrocity that caused indignation to Great Britain. In other ways, however, networks have only started, since the country has to face deep issues raised by the attack.
How did you escape the networks of multiple agencies, including an anti -terrorism initiative called prevention, to which it was reported three times? How should the authorities face young people who set themselves on violence for themselves, rather than at the service of Islamist ideologies or other extremists and who access a stream of graphic content and online encouragement? And the laws made in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, “must change to recognize this new and dangerous threat”, as the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, suggested?
‘Poisonous online extremism’
In the police interviews, Mr. Rudakubana refused to give any reason for his knife attack. The subsequent revolts broke out throughout England were fed by false statements that it was an act of Islamist terrorism committed by a migrant without documents recently arrived.
In fact, Mr. Rudakubana was a British citizen, born in Wales to a Christian family from Rwanda. At his sentence last week, the prosecutor, Deanna Heer, said: “There is no evidence that has attributed to a particular political or religious ideology; He was not fighting for a cause. His only purpose was to kill. “
Subsequently, the police found 164,000 documents and images on its digital devices, including images and videos of corpses, torture and beheadings, demonstrating a “long -standing obsession with violence, killing and genocide”, said the lady Heer.
His research has gone through a chaotic range of conflicts, including those involving Nazi Germany, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Balkans. He had also downloaded a Al Qaeda training manual that included knife attack methods. He had prepared the ricine, a biological toxin, and had kept it in a plastic dining box under his bed.
Teachers worried about his interest in violence had reported him to prevent three times when he was 13 and 14 years old. Prevent, which began in 2003, aims to identify the people who show the first signs of terrorist tendencies and deviate them from violence before it happens. But his goal is on ideology and after each postponement of Rudakubana, the officials closed the case because it seemed to be lacking in ideological motivation.
Diagnosticated with autism at 14, she had become increasingly lonely, anxious and aggressive in the years preceding the attack. He received a mental health treatment for four years, but “he stopped working” with the doctors in 2023, the officials said in a note. But his defense lawyer said that “there were no psychiatric tests that could suggest that a mental disorder contributed” to his actions.
Anti -terrorism officials have warned for some time who are seeing more people with amorphous and poorly defined extremist sections. Ken McCallum, head of Mi5, British national security service, said last year that “young people were attracted by poisonous online extremism” and that aspiring terrorists had a “wide range of beliefs and ideologies”.
At the beginning of this month, another British teenager, Cameron Finnigan, was sentenced to prison after being part of an online satanist group with neonazian connections called 764, which was the subject of an FBI public warning the group blackmailing the Other children in filming or transmit in streaming self -harm, violence and sexual abuse. Finnigan, 19, used the Telegram app to encourage contacts to commit murder and suicide.
And in 2021, a 22 -year -old man, Jake Davison, killed his mother in Plymouth, England, before wandering the streets with a hunting rifle and killing a three -year -old girl, her father and two other passers -by before killing himself. Mr. Davison was immersed in the online communities of Incels-the so-called “celibate involuntary” who blame women for their perceived inability to form relationships.
Like Mr. Rudakubana, Mr. Davison had previously been reported to the prevention program. A career consultant that Referral did to an investigation that a prevented official said that Mr. Davison did not satisfy the intervention criteria.
While each case was unique, in all three, the isolated young people were able to access a wealth of materials that glorify mass murder, therefore encouraged or made violence in the real world. Yet no one adapted perfectly to the current definition of terrorism of Great Britain, which requires a purpose of “making a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”.
The Great Britain office, which supervises, said that in the case of Mr. Rudakubana, “the opportunities were missed to intervene”, and Mr. Starmer has announced an investigation on “all our system against the extremist”, saying that he understood why the case did “people wonder what the word” terrorism “means.”
But the proposals to expand the definition of terrorism are controversial. Jonathan Hall, an independent auditor of the Great Britain terrorism legislation, has warned against an opinion article of last week that expanding the definition to include “violence clearly intended to terrorize”, as suggested by Mr. Starmer, risking “too many” false positives “. He also worried that he would extend the anti -terror resources. Mr. Hall instead asked “a completely new ability to face those who are motivated by non -instrumental extreme violence”.
‘Mixed, unclear and unstable ideology’
Islamist terrorism remains the greatest threatening for the safety that Britain has to face, responsible for about 75 % of the anti -terrorism work by M15, says the agency, while extreme right terrorism is responsible for most others .
But Vicki Evans, the senior national coordinator of the United Kingdom for the anti -terrorism police, recognized that the authorities had been struggling with an emerging cohort of people that the prevention program labeled “mixed, unclear and unstable ideology”, in which Mr. Rudakubana has fallen. “There are an increasing number of young people with complex fixations with violence and blood in our case, but without a clear ideology in addition to that charm,” he said.
Since then, it has divided the “mixed, unclear and unstable” category in different parts, including Incel and obsessive for school filming. But almost one in five person reported in the year until March 2024 was still simply classified as “in conflict”.
Gina Vale, a criminologist from the University of Southampton who studies transgressors for adolescent terrorism, said that the trend has grown internationally for several years. “There are less clearly defined ideological fault lines, in particular among young people – this is a reality to which we must now adapt,” he said.
A study of 2024 out of 140 terrorists condemned in England and Wales discovered that 57 percent of solitary attackers had some form of “mental, neurodactiveness or personality disorder” and what internet “was found to play an important role in the paths of radicalization and preparation attacks. “
The transgressors of adolescent terror are often socially isolated, said dr. It is worth, and for many, “violence in whatever form is the answer – to obtain status, connect with a network, to have the feeling of belonging, to seek revenge, whatever it is. “
A revision of Prevent’s response to Mr. Rudakubana will be published in a few days. Yvette Cooper, the secretary of the house, has already told Parliament that the review has concluded that “too much weight has been placed in the absence of ideology” without considering his obsession with extreme violence.
But in the midst of the debate that his attack could have been prevented, the experts note that a small subset of individuals has always been able to scary violence.
“People do not need a consistent world vision to embark on mass violence,” said Tim Squirell, who seeks violent movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research institute in London. “We cannot prevent every single case, but we must look at mass violence as a problem in itself rather than as a subset of terrorism.”