A teenager who killed three teenage girls and injured 10 others in a knife attack at a dance class in Southport, England, last summer will be sentenced on Thursday.
Judge Julian Goes, who presided over the trial, told the attacker, 18-year-old Axel Rudakobana, that a life sentence would be inevitable after he pleaded guilty on Monday.
Mr Rodacobana appeared at Liverpool Crown Court wearing a gray sweat suit, with a blue medical mask covering his mouth and nose. When asked by the judge to confirm his name, he refused to speak and silently put his head in his lap.
But shortly after the sentencing hearing began, as prosecutors were reading the details of the case against him, Mr. Rodakobana began shouting from the defendant’s dock at the back of the room, “I’ve got to talk to a paramedic, because I feel sick.”
The judge noted that medical experts had examined Mr Rudakubana that morning and decided he was fit to attend the hearing. His lawyer told the judge that the defendant had not eaten for several days, and that Mr Rudakubana had been screaming for several minutes.
Judge Goose said: “These proceedings are under my control, not yours, Mr Rodkobana. Do you understand?” He then ordered Mr Rudakubana removed from the court, saying, “I will not obstruct him.”
Since Mr Rudakobana pleaded guilty on Monday, a picture has emerged of a deeply troubled youth victim of violence, as evidenced by the fact that he had been a local for years before the July 29 stabbing in the town of Southport. was on the authorities’ radar. North of Liverpool.
After the attack, a series of riots rocked the UK as misinformation about the attacker’s identity circulated on social media and messaging apps. False claims that he was an undocumented immigrant or newly arrived asylum seeker were promoted by far-right extremists. Mr Rudakobana is a British citizen who was born in Wales to parents who are from Rwanda.
Police and prosecutors said there was no evidence he was affiliated with any particular political or religious ideology.
Between the ages of 13 and 14, he was referred three times to Prevent, a British counter-terrorism program, because of fixations on his violence, but these referrals were eventually dropped because each time it was fixed. It was held that he did not meet the intervention threshold.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Downing Street on Tuesday that the attack was a sign that terrorism was on the rise in the country, and that young people were being radicalized by a “wave of violence freely available online”. is being made.
“We also see acts of extreme violence by loners, roughnecks, young men in their bedrooms, accessing all sorts of content online, desperate for notoriety,” Mr Starmer said. For your own sake.”
Mr Rudakobana was also convicted on weapons charges of possessing the knife used in the attack, producing biological toxin and “possessing information” which would be “useful to a person in the commission or preparation of an act”. likely. about terrorism” when investigators found Recon, a deadly poison, and a PDF file titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the. The Tyrant: The Al Qaeda Training Manual in His Home.
The judge will not be able to sentence him to a life sentence – a life sentence with the condition that the offender must never be released from prison on parole – because he was only 17 at the time of the fatal attack.
In 2019, Mr Rudakubana was expelled after bringing a knife to school and returned a few months later to attack a student with a hockey stick. He was then admitted to a school for children with special needs.
A local safety agency said he had struggled to integrate at a new school, and his isolation deepened when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020 and schools closed across the UK. He had been withdrawn from his family and community long before the attack, and had barely left the house.
Police said that a week before the attack, Mr Rudakubana tried to go to his former high school, but his father ran out of the house and begged the taxi driver not to take him. Finally the young man returned home.
On July 29, though, he managed to get a taxi to Heartspace, where a sold-out Taylor Swift-themed dance class for 6- to 11-year-olds was on during the summer break from school.
Mr Rudakubana burst into a room full of 26 children and stabbed several of them. Baby King, 6, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, were so badly injured that they died inside the building, and Alice de Silva Aguirre, 9, ran outside with the other children but soon collapsed, police said. He was taken to hospital and died the next day. Eight other children and two adults were injured in the attack.
The case has raised questions about how authorities missed opportunities to stop the violence before it started. The government has said it will hold a public inquiry into the matter to better understand what happened and what needs to change. But the case has also highlighted the issue of violent youth who access images and messages online that fuel that obsession.
