On October 4, 2019, a 13-year-old British boy called a child protection hotline from his home in Banks, a village in northwest England, and asked: “What should I do if I want to kill someone? “
The teenager, Axel Rudakubana, said that he started taking a knife at school because he was the victim of intimidation. After the hotline advisers called the police, he told the police that he thought he would use the weapon if he was angry.
It was the first of several warnings on Mr. Rudakubana, now 18, and his increasingly violent trends. But five years after this call, on July 29 of last year, he was able to make one of the worst attacks on children in recent British history, murdering three girls in a dance class on the theme of Taylor Swift In Southport, a city near Banks, and try to kill eight other 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 atrocity which caused indignation through Great Britain. In other respects, however, the calculation has only just started, because the country faces deep questions raised by the attack.
How did he go through the nets of several agencies-including an initiative to combat terrorism called prevention, to which he was referred three times? How should the authorities take care of young people who become obsessed with violence for herself, rather than serving Islamist ideologies or other extremists, and who access a torrent of graphic content and online encouragement? And the laws designed following terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, “do they need to change to recognize this new dangerous threat”, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested last week?
“ Toxic online extremism ”
In police interviews, Mr. Rudakubana refused to give a reason for his attack on the knife. The riots that followed who broke out through England were fed by false affirmations that it was an act of Islamist terrorism committed by a recently arrived migrant.
In fact, Mr. Rudakubana was a British citizen, born in Wales of a Christian family in Rwanda. During his conviction last week, the prosecutor, Deanna Heer, said: “There is no evidence that he attributed to a particular political or religious ideology; He was not fighting for a cause. His only goal was to kill. »»
Police then found 164,000 documents and images on his digital devices, including images and videos of corpses, tortures and beheadings, demonstrating a “long -standing obsession for violence, murder and genocide,” said Mrs. Heer.
His research lasted a chaotic fan of conflicts, especially those involving Nazi, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and the Balkans. He also downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual which included knife attack methods. He had done Ricin, An organic toxin, and kept it in a plastic lunch box under her bed.
Teachers concerned about his interest in violence had pointed out him to prevent three times when he was 13 and 14 years old. Take, which started in 2003, aims to identify people who show early signs of terrorist trends and divert them from violence before it happens. But he focuses on ideology, and after each reference by Mr. Rudakubana, officials closed the case because he seemed to lack ideological motivation.
Diagnosed with autism at 14, it had become more and more reclusive, anxious and aggressive in the years preceding the attack. He received mental health treatment for four years but “Stop to get involved” With clinicians in 2023, officials said in a statement. But his defense lawyer said that there was “no psychiatric evidence that could suggest that a mental disorder had contributed” to his actions.
Those responsible for the fight against terrorism have warned for a certain time that they see more people with amorphous and poorly defined extremist features. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, the British internal security service, said last year that “very young people are attracted to toxic online extremism” and that potential terrorists had a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies”.
Earlier this month, another British teenager, Cameron Finniganwas sentenced to prison after being part of an online Satanist group with neonazi ties called 764, which was the subject of a Public warning by the FBI. The group makes other children sing in filming or live broadcast of self -control, violence and sexual abuse. Mr. Finnigan, 19, used the Telegram application to encourage contacts to commit murder and suicide.
And in 2021, a 22 -year -old man, Jake Davison, assassinated his mother in Plymouth, England, before wet the streets with a hunting rifle and killing a three -year -old girl, her father and two other passers -by before before to kill it. Mr. Davison was plunged into Incels online communities – The so-called “involuntary singles” who blame women for their perceived inability to establish relationships.
Like Mr. Rudakubana, Mr. Davison had already been reported to the prevention program. A career advisor who made the observation said to an investigation that a prevention manager had declared that Mr. Davison had not met the intervention criteria.
While each case was unique, in the three, the young isolated men were able to access a multitude of material online mass murders, then encouraged or carried out real violence in the world. However, none would adapt perfectly to Great Britain Definition of terrorismwhich requires an objective to “advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”.
The British Interior Ministry, which oversees prevention, said that in the case of Mr. Rudakubana, “the opportunities were missed to intervene”, and Mr. Starmer announced an investigation into “Our counter-arre“Saying that he understood why the case did” people wondered what the word “terrorism” means.
But the proposals to extend the definition of terrorism are controversial. Jonathan Hall, a British independent review of terrorism legislation, warned In an opinion article Last week, the expansion of the definition to include “violence clearly intended to terrorize”, as suggested by Mr. Starmer, would risk “too many false positives”. He also feared that this extended counter-terrorist resources. Mr. Hall rather called for “a completely new capacity to deal with people motivated by extreme non -instrumental violence”.
“Mixed ideology, not very clear and unstable”
Islamist terrorism remains the greatest threat of security with which Great Britain is facing, responsible for around 75% of the work to combat terrorism by M15, according to the agency, while extreme terrorism on the right is responsible for Most of the others.
But Vicki Evans, the national superior coordinator of the United Kingdom for the police against terrorism, acknowledged that the authorities were struggling with an emerging cohort of people in which the prior program labeled “the mixed, unstable and unstable ideology” , in which Mr. Rudakubana fell. “There are an increasing number of young people with complex fixings with violence and gore in our case work, but without any clear ideology other than this fascination,” she said.
Prevention has since divided the category “mixed, unstable and unstable” in several parts, in particular the incels and the obsessed with school shooting. But almost one in five people were referred during the year to March 2024 were still simply classified as “conflictual”.
Gina Vale, a criminologist from the University of Southampton who studies adolescents of terrorists, said that the trend has increased internationally for several years. “There are less clear ideological flaws lines, especially among young people-it is a reality to which we must now adapt,” she said.
A 2024 Study of 140 sentenced terrorists In England and Wales, found that 57% of solitary attackers had a certain form of “mental illness, neurodivergence or a personality disorder” and that the Internet was “played as playing an important role in radicalization paths and preparing attacks ”.
Adolescent delinquents are often socially isolated, said Dr. Vale, and for many, “violence in any form is the answer – to win the status, connect with a network, have a feeling of belonging, To take revenge, anyway.
An examination of the response to use Mr. Rudakubana should be published in a few days. Yvette Cooper, the Minister of the Interior, has already says parliament That the review concluded that “too much weight had been placed on the absence of ideology” without considering its obsession for extreme violence.
But in the middle of the debate to find out if his attack could have been prevented, experts note that a small subset of people has always been capable of appalling violence.
“People do not need a coherent vision of the world to embark on mass violence,” said Tim Squirrell, who is doing research on violent movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research institute in London. “We cannot prevent each case, but we must consider mass violence as a problem in itself rather than a subset of terrorism.”
