When Axel Rudakubana returned to school after summer vacation five years ago, something had changed. He was already 13 weeks old but it wasn’t the usual difficult transition in teenage life.
“In Year 7 and Year 8 he was quite unusual. Nothing that would have been red flags,” said a source close to Range High School in Formby, a seaside town on Merseyside. “What happened this summer is the question.”
Within a month of the new term, he complained of racial bullying. Fellow pupils said he began “acting out” in class, protesting with teachers and sometimes walking out. “Exceling,” as it became known.
In October 2019, the 13-year-old made an anonymous phone call to the NSPCC’s Childline, admitting to having homicidal thoughts about the bully. He said he had taken a kitchen knife to school on 10 occasions and asked: “What should I do if I want to kill someone?”
The distressing call was, said his barrister Stan Rees QC, “a plea for help”. This set in motion a chain of events that would culminate nearly five years later in one of the most shocking atrocities in recent British history.
It’s a story that can be told in full for the first time since Rudakubana, now 18, was sentenced Thursday to at least 52 years in prison, the longest sentence for anyone his age. For is the longest.
Within days of calling Childline, Rudakubana was permanently expelled from Range High School and mainstream education.
Records show he never settled into another school, bouncing from a student referral unit to two specialist providers, his obsession with violence growing all the time.
At his admissions interview at Acorn’s pupil referral unit in Ormuskirk, Lancashire, on 17 October 2019, he was asked why he had taken a knife to his former school. He replied: “To use it.”
It was an example of the almost childlike honesty with which he spoke to professionals, including the police, who became involved 10 days ago when he admitted to carrying a knife to school.
The 13-year-old, who lived with his parents and older brother in the quiet Lancashire village of Banks, was referred by police to the local safeguarding board, which began the process of offering behavioral and emotional welfare.
Two months later, just before pupils broke up for Christmas, he returned to Range High School armed with a hockey stick and attacked another pupil, breaking his wrist. He had to be restrained by the staff. The head teacher said Rudakubana had “no sense of wrongdoing” of his actions.
Police later found a knife in his bag and arrested him on suspicion of assault and possession of a bladed object. He pleaded guilty, obtained a criminal record at the age of 13, and began a rehabilitation program for knife crime and offending behaviour, which he completed in 2021.
Classmates had known about Rodacobana’s horror videos online for months. Now, it had come to the attention of professionals.
During an IT class at Acorn, he made alarming comments about mass shootings. A teacher looked over her shoulder to see a web page about a bloodbath at an American high school and reported it to the government’s anti-radicalization program Prevent.
He was interviewed by counter-terrorism officers but was not raised as a concern because he had no firm views.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic forced the country into lockdown in March 2020, Rudakobana has sunk deeper into the shadows.
He came under the care of mental health services at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, which said his anxiety was preventing him from leaving the house. Neighbors barely noticed him, and described him as a virtual recluse.
Spending days at home online, he downloaded a version of al-Qaeda’s training manual in 2021 three times, later using it to create the deadly poison racin in his bedroom.
In February 2021, a former student reported Rudakobana’s suspension due to posts he shared on Instagram about the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. This time he was not personally seen by counter-terrorism officers and his case was closed.
Two months later he was on Prevents’ radar for a third time when a teacher at Acorn noticed he was researching the 2017 London Bridge attack. Again, he was not met in person and no further action was taken.
In the six months from November 2021, officers from Lancashire Constabulary were called to Rodacobana’s home four times as his behavior became more erratic.
At one point, after his mother reported him missing, the police found him on a bus with a knife, refusing to pay his fare.
Rudakubana told officers he wanted to stab someone so police would confiscate his phone and delete the embarrassing videos, which were on social media accounts he could no longer access.
His barrister Rees said he was “adamant” about removing the videos and “did not appear to understand the consequences of such actions”.
Instead of arresting him – which would have been his second arrest for a knife crime – they took him home and told his mother to put the knife out of his reach.
Weeks later, they were back at Rudakubana’s house when he exploded when his father banned him from using the laptop. His parents sought help from the officers to deal with him.
The police referred him each time to local security teams but his engagement with them was slipping.
In his bedroom, he was planning the attack. He bought castor beans, funnels, flasks and safety glasses on Amazon, delivering them to an unsuspecting neighbor. Police believe he was using an al Qaeda manual to learn how to kill with a knife.
One area identified as a failure at the public inquiry into the Southport attack was a clear lack of communication between local police forces and containment, police sources suggested.
It is understood that frontline officers could not see Rodakobana’s interception history because the data is kept on a separate system, accessible only to counter-terrorism officials.
Rudakubana had stopped engaging with mental health support by February 2023. He hadn’t been to school in almost a year and was spending as much time at home on his tablet as possible, wandering down terrifying rabbit holes.
He never hid his dark obsession. Professionals who visited him at home said the Rwandan genocide – a mass killing in which both his parents were captured – “was all he wanted to talk about”. They started insisting on the presence of a police officer in their meetings.
People were clearly concerned about it, but either it was never taken seriously, or no one knew what to do with it.
By the summer of 2024, nearly five years after his call to Childline, Rudkobana’s descent from “well-disciplined” schoolboy to one of Britain’s most notorious killers was complete. Now he will probably spend the rest of his life in prison.
