The murders of little girls may have been a practice attempt at mass killing on an even greater scale.
The murders of little girls may have been a practice attempt at mass killing on an even greater scale.
E xactly a year ago, a little girl named Alice told a listening circle at summer camp that “this is the best day of my life.” Then she was stabbed to death.
Her killer is Axel Rudakubana. Disorder broke out across the U.K. almost immediately after he murdered Alice and two other girls in the English town of Southport, yet practically nobody knew who he was, since the law offers certain protections for offenders under age 18. Within days, a judge lifted the anonymity order because there was significant public interest, citing the “idiotic rioting.” And yet, a year after that tragic day, it is as though the only thing we know about Axel Rudakubana is his name. Inconvenient details — his long history with knife crime, his multiple referrals to the authorities, his ties to Islam, his arsenal of weapons, his plans for biological warfare — have been suppressed, and they risk being wholly forgotten. In fact, alternative narratives have been promoted: Netflix released a limited series about a white teenage boy who murdered a girl with a knife because he was radicalized by right-wing politics on the internet, and the prime minister’s office supported efforts to show the drama in school.
And so it is time to resurface the uncomfortable truths about the “most dangerous prisoner in Britain” and his murderous rampage; failing to acknowledge the facts perpetuates the myth that this tragedy was entirely unpredictable and further allows the British authorities to evade the blame they deserve.
Rudakubana was born on August 7, 2006, in Cardiff, Wales, to Rwandan immigrants. As a teenager, Rudakubana demonstrated interest in school mass shootings, the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack that killed eight people, the Irish Republican Army, MI5, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, so he was referred three separate times to the United Kingdom’s counter-extremism “Prevent” program between 2019 and 2021 — but the program assessed that he lacked a commitment to a single radical ideology and therefore was not flagged as a threat.
In 2019, he asked, “Can we have a picture of a severed head?” during an art class and, in another class that day, made a graphic comment about killing with a drill. On five occasions from 2019 to 2022, the police responded to calls from Rudakubana’s home address about his behavior. At age 13, Rudakubana brought a knife and hockey stick (on which he had written the names of former teachers and classmates) to Range High School, from which he had been expelled for carrying a knife, to attack those who had supposedly bullied him. By 2020, a family member suggested to authorities that Rudakubana had a “hit list” of three targets, and the authorities had recorded that Rudakubana — unbothered by the idea of prison — intended to hit a particular boy with the hockey stick, then finish the job with the knife. That year, Rudakubana was convicted for the incident and handed a referral order, which is essentially an action plan of things like counseling to prevent re-offending.
But Rudakubana is not the type of person who can be rehabilitated.
At age 17 and with knife crime on his record, he ordered two Apollo Cerbera kitchen knives with 20-cm (7.8-inch) blades and a sharp point from Amazon for just under £3 on July 13, 2024. Although the corporation has a two-stage verification process to enforce the United Kingdom’s ban on the sale of knives to minors, Rudakubana circumvented the first step with software that camouflaged his personal data and disguised his internet address. The driver delivered the package with Rudakubana’s name on it to his home address, where the recipient was marked as visibly over age 25.
On July 22, 2024, Rudakubana was wearing a hoodie and a surgical mask when he tried to book a taxi that would take him from home to Range High School, the site of his previous offense. But his father intervened and pleaded with the driver, so Rudakubana left the car and went inside the house.
Another week passed. On July 29, Rudakubana paced up and down his street at about 6 a.m. — which was odd, since a neighbor had “never, ever seen him walking about the estate.” Later, he dressed in a surgical mask and the same hoodie as the previous week, grabbed one of those knives, and booked a taxi (this time, after leaving the home) to the Hart Space in Southport, where he knew a Taylor Swift–themed dance class was occurring. He may have suspected that his victims at the Taylor Swift party would be mostly girls and mostly white by virtue of her fan base and because Southport’s population as of 2021 was almost 95 percent white. He must have further guessed that the attendees at a summer camp would be mostly young, posing no physical challenge. After refusing to pay the driver upon arrival, Rudakubana entered the building at about 11:45 a.m. He found the room where 26 children were singing songs and making friendship bracelets like the ones so trendy among Swift fans. There, Rudakubana grabbed the child closest to him and stabbed her.
For 15 minutes, he was unstoppable. He stabbed a seven-year-old 32 times; security footage showed that she had nearly escaped, then he yanked her back inside. He stabbed a ten-year-old eight times, an eight-year-old four times, a ten-year-old two times, and punctured one girl so deeply that the blade reached her spine. A nine-year-old was stabbed three times in the back and incurred several fractures, and another child suffered a deep wound and laceration. Leanne Lucas, one of the dance class organizers, was stabbed five times and suffered fractures to her spine, a rib, and her shoulder blade. Jonathan Hayes, another adult working in the building, was stabbed in the leg when he tried to intervene. A teenage girl was stabbed twice and incurred spinal fractures. She later said Rudakubana “didn’t look human.” He looked “possessed.”
Those are the ones he didn’t kill. He inflicted at least 85 sharp-force injuries on seven-year-old Elsie Stancombe, a chop wound to the head and four stab wounds upon nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar, and at least 122 sharp-force injuries to six-year-old Bebe King. In the doctor’s opinion, Rudakubana tried to decapitate Bebe. The girls died.
The attack was timed so that parents were showing up to retrieve their children. Rather than see their daughters run outside with new beaded bracelets, parents instead encountered screaming girls stumbling out of the building, some of them leaving small, bloodied handprints on cars before collapsing. “As I got closer it was like a scene from a horror film. . . . I saw scenes I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” one father recalled later, who arrived unaware that one of his two daughters at the camp had been stabbed and taken to a nearby house, where she lay on the couch as her younger sister said, “Please don’t die,” and would soon go to the hospital for two blood transfusions. A man who worked at the nearby garage heard a “scream of terror” and ran over to discover a collapsed child, who asked, “Am I going to die?” He told her no, but he wasn’t sure that was true. Window cleaner Joel Verite was just driving by when he saw the chaos; he got out of the car and ran inside to see Rudakubana standing atop a staircase with the knife. A local resident, Steve, ran over with hammers. But before Joel and Steve could intervene, three police officers dashed in to find Rudakubana standing with the bloody weapon over Bebe, her body ravaged by stab wounds. He was tased, arrested, and taken into custody. “I’m glad to see those kids are dead,” he told the police entirely unprompted. “It makes me happy.”
At his home, police discovered tons of images of knives and machetes on his computer, as well as the document “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The al-Qaeda Training Manual,” which describes how to kill with a knife by targeting the head and the neck — which is precisely what he did. There were images of dead people, and cartoons about rape. Rudakubana owned a machete and a set of arrows. Records revealed that he had watched hours of violent content, including beheading videos. Authorities also found enough ricin pulp and castor beans for over 1,000 doses, which could potentially kill 12,000 people; he had bought the seeds on Amazon with a fake name and deliberately had them delivered to a neighbor’s address. Ricin production, too, is detailed in the al-Qaeda manual.
What have his parents, Alphonse and Laetitia Muzayire, said about the contraband found in their home? Practically nobody has been able to ask them. They have since been “moved by police for their protection” to a “secret location,” according to their Christian congregation, which added that Axel was not present on Sundays.
On January 23, 2025, Rudakubana was sentenced. Had he been an adult when he committed the horrors, the judge would have imposed a lifelong sentence without a minimum term, thereby precluding the possibility of release. But because Rudakubana stabbed those girls nine days before his 18th birthday and thus was a minor, he was given life with a minimum term of 52 years, after which he can apply to the parole board for release. Should that board decide he can be released into the community, he would be on license, and breaching the terms would send him back into custody.
Rudakubana was not in court for the sentencing. He had been shouting from the dock and interrupting the proceedings, yelling things such as “I can’t remain quiet,” “I haven’t eaten for ten days,” “I feel ill,” “I’m not going to remain quiet,” and “don’t continue.” The judge removed him because he was “preventing the hearing from being held in the normal way.” (Rudakubana’s defender further claimed that “he has not eaten for a number of days,” although the medical staff told the judge that Rudakubana was fit enough for court. An al-Qaeda manual suggests that a hunger strike is a potentially successful tactic for when “an Indictment is Issued and the Trial Begins.”) In his absence, Rudakubana was convicted of three counts of murder, ten of attempted murder, one of producing a biological toxin, and one of possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
Despite his conviction under the Terrorism Act 2000, the murder spree itself was not treated as a terrorist attack. “The prosecution have made it clear that these proceedings were not acts of terrorism within the meaning of the terrorism legislation, because there is no evidence that Rudakubana’s purpose was to advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause (emphasis mine),” the judge wrote in his sentencing remarks, further writing rather indifferently that “whether his motivation was for terrorism or not misses the point.” (Perhaps these statements are why an article by a BBC “disinformation and social media correspondent” claiming Rudakubana “appears to have no known links to Islam” remains online without a correction.) The court concluded that Rudakubana committed violence for the sake of violence, not for a cause, and the judge noted that Rudakubana “had a long standing preoccupation with violent killing and genocide.” (As noted elsewhere, the familial history might be relevant; Rudakubana’s parents are both Tutsis who fled Rwanda to escape the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group and reportedly have ties to the current Rwandan ruling party.)
The United Kingdom’s Prevent program, the prosecution, and the judge maintain that Rudakubana lacked an “ideology.” But why? Surely the guy who copied an al-Qaeda manual, demonstrated interest in terrorism that occurred in the United Kingdom, watched beheading videos, and cared about Israel-Palestine tensions was at least partially an Islamist. Even if we pretend that Rudakubana is not an Islamist, he obviously had an ideology that included anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-female extremism. Rudakubana held an internally coherent value system based on immoral premises that maintains (a) human life, especially that which is female, has little or no value, (b) violence is an instrumental good, (c) violence is an end in itself, and (d) excessive violence beyond what is necessary to inflict pain is justifiable. In other words, terror for the purpose of terror is a value that organizes conduct and forms the basis for an extremist ideology, and thus his murder spree was to “advance a[n] . . . ideological cause (emphasis mine),” even if he did not endorse a broader political or religious framework. The judge says that Rudakubana’s “evil” crime was “of such extreme violence, of the utmost and exceptionally high seriousness, that it is difficult to comprehend why it was done,” yet the atrocities can be explained by idealizing terror for the sake of terror. Ideology — contra popular interpretation — need not be foreign, nor developed from a dissertation-length written work, nor consist of policy proposals, nor require an associated organization or institution, nor be defensible.
Rudakubana’s ideology is organized by one principle: revenge and death. As one unnamed official told The Guardian, “He was absolutely obsessed with genocides” and “he could name every genocide in history and how many people were killed — Rwanda, Genghis Khan, Hitler. It’s all he wanted to talk about.” The prosecution called his crime a “mass killing,” the police found “clear evidence of a settled intention to carry out mass killing,” and the judge concluded that “he wanted to try and carry out mass murder of innocent, happy young girls.” The judge further wrote that “I am sure that . . . had he been able to, he would have killed each and every child, all 26 of them, as well as any adults who got in his way,” and determined that Rudakubana had a “mindset to cause many killings.”
Yet Rudakubana would not have been satisfied with murdering every girl and supervisor at the summer camp that day. He had greater ambitions. The judge concluded that Rudakubana was “very likely” to have used ricin “at some time” if he had not committed the murders that day, and such a hypothetical chemical attack might have slain over 10,000 people. The stabbings on July 29 were only a practice attempt at “mass killing.”
Indeed, Rudakubana still wants death, and prison has proved to be only a minor obstacle. He threw boiling water on a guard, and now, he is allowed out of his cell only when there are five guards in riot gear to unlock him. He reportedly has had visits from an imam even after that attack but may not join religious ceremonies because he may be targeted by other inmates.
In the past year, there have been efforts to prevent a similar tragedy, such as a ban on ninja swords, including ownership of those purchased forever ago. But we shouldn’t expect a person planning knife crime to just surrender such weapons, and we can’t just ban hot water next. After all, knives have been around for quite a while, but knife crime in the United Kingdom has gone up by 80 percent over ten years, so we should stop imbuing the objects with agency and instead look to other social factors. From the way people talk and from the wording of headlines in mainstream publications, you almost imagine that knives float around — entirely unattached to a human hand — and just start penetrating the flesh.
The unpleasant truth is that the law did not require expansion, but simple enforcement: Rudakubana was dismissed by authorities — not as a consequence of inadequately stringent policies, but of incompetent workers who made indefensible decisions. Although the British state continues inflating like a balloon with purported initiatives to mitigate violent crime, practically no new laws have combated the cancerous growth of anti-Western sentiment that underlies so much crime, from terrorist attacks to the child-rape gangs.
There will be repeat Rudakubana-type events in the United Kingdom; it is not a matter of if, but when.