ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: What really motivated Axel Rudakubana?
Axel Rudakubana has pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last summer, a crime that left Britain understandably horrified and led to days of inexcusable rioting.
The 18-year-old had originally pleaded not guilty to all charges. But on what was due to be the first day of his trial at Liverpool Crown Court on Monday, he changed his pleas to guilty.
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Part of the blame for this lies with the UK government. Its censorious and narrowly legalistic response to the attack, which limited what the public was allowed to know, created a vacuum in which wild theories and outright lies could flourish. All the authorities were prepared to say in the immediate aftermath of Rudakubana’s arrest was that the killings were ‘not being treated as terror-related’.
However, recent revelations suggest it was not unreasonable to suspect a terrorist motive. We now know that Rudakubana had downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual and had also attempted to produce Ricin, a biological toxin. Furthermore, since his guilty plea, it has emerged that he had been referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, on three separate occasions. He was first referred in 2019 when he was 13, and a further two referrals were made in 2021, all when he was a schoolboy living in Lancashire.
From this it is fair to infer that the attack could have been terror-related. Yet, seven months on, there is still no conclusive evidence as to Rudakubana’s motive. Indeed, the referrals to Prevent were born of concerns around his fascination with violence generally. He poured over materials on school shootings, wars and genocides. It is still not clear if he was attached to any particular ideology. He had been raised a Catholic and there is no evidence of any interest in Islamism, beyond the downloading of the al-Qaeda training manual.
Prime minister Keir Starmer has now ordered a public inquiry into the Southport attack. This may shed further light on what drove Rudakubana to commit this atrocity and how the state failed to stop him. But we are a long way from proving that he acted with a terrorist motive.
Perhaps the knife just went off: ‘Disgrace’ that Axel Rudakubana could buy a knife on Amazon. “Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said it was ‘a total disgrace’ that Axel Rudakubana was ‘easily able to order a knife on Amazon’ despite being aged 17 and having a conviction for violence. It is illegal to sell knives to under-18s.”
Yes, I’m shaking my head as well over that last quote. But as Robert Tracinski predicted in 2018 at the Federalist: Britain’s Knife Control Is A Bad, Real-Life Parody Of Gun Control.