The Southport Killer Was Fixated on Extreme Violence. But Was it Terrorism?

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.

In fact, Mr. Rudakubana was a British citizen, born in Wales to a Christian family from Rwanda. At his sentencing last week, the prosecutor, Deanna Heer, said: “There is no evidence that he ascribed to any particular political or religious ideology; he wasn’t fighting for a cause. His only purpose was to kill.”

The police later found 164,000 documents and images across his digital devices, including images and videos of dead bodies, torture and beheadings, demonstrating a “longstanding obsession with violence, killing and genocide,” Ms. Heer said.

His research spanned a chaotic range of conflicts, including those involving Nazi Germany, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and the Balkans. He had also downloaded an Al Qaeda training manual which included knife attack methods. He had made ricin, a biological toxin, and kept it in a plastic lunchbox under his bed.

Teachers concerned about his interest in violence had reported him to Prevent three times, when he was 13 and 14. Prevent, which started in 2003, aims to identify people who show early signs of terroristic leanings and divert them from violence before it happens. But its focus is on ideology, and after each referral of Mr. Rudakubana, officials closed the case because he appeared to lack any ideological motivation.

Diagnosed with autism at 14, he had become increasingly reclusive, anxious and aggressive in the years before the attack. He received mental health treatment for four years but “stopped engaging” with clinicians in 2023, officials said in a statement. But his defense lawyer said there was “no psychiatric evidence which could suggest that a mental disorder contributed” to his actions.

Counterterrorism officials have warned for some time that they are seeing more individuals with amorphous, ill-defined extremist traits. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, said last year that “very young people are being drawn into poisonous online extremism,” and that would-be terrorists had a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies.”

Earlier this month, another British teenager, Cameron Finnigan, was sentenced to jail after being part of an online Satanist group with neo-Nazi links called 764, which has been the subject of a public warning by the F.B.I. The group blackmails other children into filming or livestreaming self-harm, violence and sexual abuse. Mr. Finnigan, 19, used the Telegram app to encourage contacts to commit murder and suicide.

And in 2021, a 22-year-old man, Jake Davison, murdered his mother in Plymouth, England, before roaming the streets with a shotgun and killing a three-year-old girl, her father and two other passers-by before killing himself. Mr. Davison was immersed in online communities of incels — so-called “involuntary celibates” who blame women for their perceived inability to form relationships.

Like Mr. Rudakubana, Mr. Davison had previously been reported to the Prevent program. A careers adviser who made the referral told an inquest that a Prevent official had said Mr. Davison did not meet the criteria for intervention.

While each case was unique, in all three, isolated young men were able to access a wealth of material online glorifying mass murder, and then encouraged or carried out real world violence. Yet none would fit neatly into Britain’s current definition of terrorism, which requires a purpose of “advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.”

Britain’s Home Office, which oversees Prevent, said that in the case of Mr. Rudakubana, “opportunities were missed to intervene,” and Mr. Starmer has announced an inquiry into “our entire counterextremist system,” saying he understood why the case made “people wonder what the word ‘terrorism’ means.’”

But proposals to expand the definition of terrorism are contentious. Jonathan Hall, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned in an opinion article last week that broadening the definition to include “violence clearly intended to terrorize,” as Mr. Starmer suggested, would risk “too many false positives.” He also worried it would stretch counterterror resources. Mr. Hall called instead for “a wholly new capability to deal with those motivated by noninstrumental extreme violence.”

‘Mixed, Unclear and Unstable Ideology’

Islamist terrorism remains the largest security threat facing Britain, responsible for approximately 75 percent of counterterrorism work by M15, the agency says, while extreme right-wing terrorism is responsible for most of the rest.

But Vicki Evans, the U.K.’s senior national coordinator for counterterrorism policing, acknowledged that authorities had been grappling with an emerging cohort of people that the Prevent program labeled “mixed, unclear and unstable ideology,” which Mr. Rudakubana fell into. “There are a growing number of young people with complex fixations with violence and gore in our casework, but with no clear ideology other than that fascination,” she said.

Prevent has since split the “mixed, unclear and unstable” category into several parts, including incels and school shooting obsessives. But almost one in five people referred in the year to March 2024 were still simply categorized as “conflicted.”

Gina Vale, a University of Southampton criminologist who studies teenage terror offenders, said the trend has grown internationally for several years. “There are less clearly defined ideological fault lines, particularly among young people — that’s a reality that we now need to adapt to,” she said.

A 2024 study of 140 convicted terrorists in England and Wales found that 57 percent of lone attackers had some form of “mental illness, neurodivergence or a personality disorder,” and that the internet was “found to play an important role in radicalization pathways and attack preparation.”

Teenage terror offenders are often socially isolated, Dr. Vale said, and for many, “violence in whatever form is seen to be the answer — to gain status, to connect with a network, to have a feeling of belonging, to seek revenge, whatever it is.”

A review into Prevent’s response to Mr. Rudakubana is set to be published within days. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has already told Parliament that the review concluded that “too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology” without considering his obsession with extreme violence.

But amid the debate over whether his attack could have been prevented, experts note that a small subset of individuals have always been capable of appalling violence.

“People don’t need a coherent worldview to embark on mass violence,” said Tim Squirrell, who researches violent movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research institute in London. “We cannot prevent every single case but we need to be looking at mass violence as a problem in itself rather than as a subset of terrorism.”