What Radicalized Axel Rudakubana?

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all sixteen charges on the 20th of January, 2025. These include the murders of Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King, ten charges of attempted murder, one charge of possession of a knife, the production of a ricin (under the Biological Weapons Act 1974) and possession of Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual (under the Terrorism Act 2000). In the case of 6-year-old Bebe King, Rudakubana stabbed her 122 times, and tried to decapitate her. He was sentenced today to life in prison, with a minimum fixed term of 51 years and 190 days. The 13 life sentences for all counts will be served concurrently; and deductions were given for his age and late-entered guilty plea. Due to his age (17) at the time of the crimes, Rudakubana was ineligible for a whole-life order — and so may be eventually eligible for release, aged 70. The judge lamented his inability to give him a whole life sentence, and said that, although the authorities had not determined the murders an act of terrorism, they were equivalent to one. He said “It is likely that he [Rudakubana] will be in prison all his life.” Proceedings were delayed when he refused to enter the court. Rudakubana was then removed after he interrupted proceedings twice, shouting that he was ill and would not be silent. The sentence was passed in his absence. For the short time he was present, he wore a hoodie and disposable face-mask — the same outfit in which he perpetrated the attack.

Despite the latter charges, the Southport massacre is still not being treated as a terror attack by the authorities. This became more perplexing when it was revealed that Rudakubana was referred to government anti-extremism programme Prevent three times before the murders. As Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Parliament on Monday,

“Multiple different agencies were in contact with Rudakubana and knew about his history of violence. He was referred to Prevent three times between December 2019 and April 2021, when aged 13 and 14. Between October 2019 and May 2022, Lancashire police responded to five calls from his home address about his behaviour. He was referred repeatedly to the multi-agency safeguarding hub. He had contact with children’s social care, the Early Help service, and child and adolescent mental health services. He was convicted of a violent assault against another child at school and was referred to the youth offending team. He was excluded from one school and had long periods of absence from another.”

As I have written previously, the British government distracts and denies anytime the perpetrator of a terror attack is of an ethnicity and ideology inconvenient to their politically correct narrative. Until guilty pleas were entered, the press and public were kept ignorant of details about Rudakubana’s background. Unlike in America, where the jury are sequestered, the British public are sequestered for fear of jeopardising the jury. Information about the case is embargoed. In the absence of answers, speculation ensued. After rumours that the assailant was an illegal Syrian immigrant were proven untrue, it was insisted for months that he was a quiet Welsh choirboy. The release of his frightful mugshot dispelled that myth.

Keir Starmer held press conferences to condemn those suggesting any connection to Islam as “Far Right”. This persisted even after Rudakubana’s possession of the Al-Qaeda manual, and allegations that he attended mosque in prison, were made public. And yet, Starmer continues to deny any wrongdoing, even after it was proven he withheld information from the public. He remains remorseless, despite the death of a protestor in prison, after he demanded the justice system work around the clock to convict them.

Starmer’s reason given remains not wanting to prejudice the trial. But, as Conservative MP Nick Timothy noted in Parliament, how would declaring the Southport massacre a terror incident have prejudiced the case? Starmer knew of the ricin and Al-Qaeda manual found in Rudabukana’s home almost immediately after the search; and of the terror charges two weeks before the Crown Prosecution Service announced them. Such details in other incidents — the Parson’s Green bombing in 2017, and murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess — led the motive of the attackers to be announced as terrorism within a day. Given Rudakubana was apprehended at the scene, and has since pled guilty, why would the declaration of the attack as a terror event compromise proceedings in any way? 

What is so special for Starmer in this case remains an unanswered question. But another is posed by Prevent’s failures: surely someone in Rudabukana’s life suspected he was capable of committing this atrocity? Could somebody close to him have stopped this?

The headteacher of his former school suggested as much, when sending a letter to parents and pupils, telling them not to talk to the press. No prevention order was placed on positive depictions of Rudakubana — such as the press’ suggestion that he was reclusive, harmless, and a dedicated Christian. (All which turned out to be untrue.) It has since transpired that Rudakubana was expelled from Range High School in Formby, in October 2019, for threatening to bring a knife into school and avenge himself against alleged bullies. During court proceedings, it was revealed he brought a knife to school on ten occasions — and was referred to the police in 2019 after asking Childline what to do if he wanted to kill a classmate. Newly released video footage shows a 13-year-old Rudakubana being restrained by classmates after he attempted to attack another student. One former school-friend described him as “a ticking timebomb”. Rudakubana then snuck back onto school grounds weeks later, armed with a hockey-stick and a “hit-list” of students, and broke a classmate’s wrist before being tackled to the ground by teachers.

“All the teachers were closing the doors and not letting anyone out of the lessons.

“He ran down to the language block and he was trying to find [a boy] specifically, I think, with a hockey stick, and he was trying to attack him with it. So then our headteacher had to jump on him and kind of escort him out.” […]

“We were walking around the corridors and the next minute, you know, I just saw a big bright yellow coat running towards me. And then he went to hit [a boy] over the head with the stick.

“But luckily the headteacher tackled him to the ground and then he was just on the floor with the headteacher on top of him.”

Police were called, and Rudakubana received a youth justice referral order. He was then placed in the Acorns School in Lancashire and Presfield High School and Specialist College in Southport — where his attendance was less than 1 percent. His parents did not address his truancy. Mental health and social services involvement then seemed to cease during the lockdowns imposed by the Johnson government during the COVID pandemic.

Before the attack is blamed on bigotry by his classmates, it should be noted that Rudakubana called for “white genocide” during a football match, and spoke to pupils about his fixation with genocides. One official told The Guardian that

“He was absolutely obsessed with genocides,” said one senior official. “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.”

Downloaded to his personal tablet devices were documents on ISIS car bombs, Nazi Germany, violence involving Buddhists in Sri Lanka, ethnic clan-based cleansing in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, the Iraq and Balkans wars, and depictions of torture and beheadings. He had also researched the 2024 Sydney Church stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmannuel by a suspected Islamist. Police also found copious post-colonial literature in his bedroom, including: A place under heaven – Amerindian Torture and Cultural Violence, The Mau Mau War: British Counterinsurgency in Colonial Kenya, Death and survival during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Examination of punishments dealt to slave rebels in two 18th Century British Plantation Societies, and Before The Poison Had Been Far Spread (about 18th-century British plantations in Antigua and South Carolina). It appears Rudakubana was nurturing a violent ethnic resentment toward the British, based on the history of British imperial rule in Africa. His contempt of fellow pupils for their race, and desire to do them harm, preceded his murdering three girls in Southport. After being arrested on the 29th of July 2024, Rudakubana told police, “It’s a good thing those children are dead. I’m so glad. I’m so happy.”

His homemade ricin also poisoned and killed neighbour Caroline McDonald’s cat, which had wandered into a police forensics tent. This was despite police telling McDonald “there was nothing toxic or hazardous found next door – that was an outright lie.”

He caused just as much trouble for his family. Axel’s father, Alphonse Rudakubana, was a soldier in the Rwanda Patriotic Front, and granted asylum in the UK in 2002. Alphonse is believed to have fled Rwanda with Axel’s mother, Laetitia Muzayire, before the 1994 Genocide of his Tutsi people; possibly to neighbouring Uganda. Who and why they were approved for asylum in the UK, eight years after the genocide, has not yet been explained. Alphonse retains diplomatic ties to the ruling party in Rwanda. He relocated his family to Southport in 2013, to work as a taxi driver. He attended the evangelical Community Church in Southport — but Axel did not worship there.

A week before the Southport massacre, Axel booked a taxi under the pseudonym Simon to Range High School, on the last day of term, determined to commit the UK’s first mass school stabbing. Alphonse intervened, calling the police, and convincing his son to come back inside the house. He did not have his son sectioned, or detained by police. Axel would go on to use the same outfit, weapon, and mode of transportation in the subsequent Southport massacre. 

Rudakubana’s family brought up this monster, and are now housed in a secure location at taxpayers’ expense. They should be deported at the earliest available opportunity for raising a killer, and refusing to turn him over to the authorities after his repeated planned attacks. 

Despite these clear failings by Rudakubana’s family and the authorities, Starmer and Cooper have instead blamed the easy availability of knives for Rudakubana’s attack. The Mirror cites his use of Amazon to purchase the murder weapon as proof that billionaires like Jeff Bezos are to blame. The Sun are already trying to give Rudakubana the moniker “the Amazon Killer”. The fact that there are already age verification checks on Amazon, which Rudakubana presumably bypassed by using his neglectful parents’ ID and debit/credit card, was not mentioned.

Instead, just as with Sir David Amess’ murder, the Southport attack is being used as a pretext for further surveillance and censorship of online speech, and making it harder for housewives to buy kitchen utensils. I have drawers full of cutlery at home, but you don’t catch me going on a stabbing spree. Nor are Sikhs or cub-scouts the culprits of these attacks. Likewise, I use Musk’s X to aggregate news, and, despite what the likes of James O’Brien say, have never been driven to commit acts of violence against children.

Douglas Murray calls this “a uniquely British” preoccupation with “second-order problems”: focusing the downstream effects of a problem, to avoid confronting the government’s culpability in manufacturing terror attacks via its policy of mass third-world immigration, multiculturalism, and Islamist appeasement. The British government and media would rather blame knives or “online harms” than admit fault for importing criminals, promoting anti-white racism, and allowing Islamism to go unchecked. Such displacement activity reeks of RICU’s “controlled spontaneity” tactics: where the Home Office’s propaganda department directs how newspapers cover terror-related stories. The most infamous is The Sun newspaper printing a photograph of a woman wearing a Union Jack hijab on the front page, prefabricated by Breakthrough Media, a communications company and RICU, on October 8th, 2014, after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded on video by ISIS.

Another instance concerns the protests following Rudakubana’s attack last summer. On 8th August, 2024, government-funded activist groups Stand Up To Racism and HOPE Not Hate convened counter-protests against “a hundred far-right rallies” — all of which failed to materialise. Though this was later admitted to be a hoax, newspapers of ostensibly different political persuasions published photos of the counterprotest on their front page.

I inquired via Freedom of Information request as to RICU’s involvement in coordinating the coverage. I received a dismissive response, saying RICU had no involvement in writing the headlines of each newspaper. But it remains plausible that RICU were involved in instructing newspapers to present a unified front against a fictional “far right” in order to contain public outrage over the Southport massacre. Even if it weren’t coordinated, the way the media spin this story renders them complicit in the cover-up. Sickeningly, Sky News used their live coverage of the trial to platform executive of the Liverpool Muslim Council, Tawhid Islam to recite the mantra “Diversity is our strength.” Islam then asked “Why are we talking about terrorism?”, and obfuscated with waffle about the murders being a problem of indiscriminate male violence against women.

The refusal to treat this attack as an act of terror, and the failure of Prevent to stop it, is yet another example of sensitivities about racism and Islamophobia taking precedence. This was the case with Sir David Amess’ killer, Abi Harbi Ali, who had one meeting with Prevent after being referred in 2014, before having his case file closed without follow-up. David’s daughter, Katie, has revealed her efforts to get an inquest into failings by the civil service were met with hostility and threats of legal action. Ali is likely one of many Islamists overlooked by Prevent. William Shawcross found lobbying efforts by Jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir have deterred the Home Office from monitoring Islamic terror. Members of the Home Office’s Islamic Network then disparaged Shawcross and  “argued Prevent is inherently racist because it focuses on Islamist extremism”. As a result, Prevent referrals for Islamic extremism have dropped below those of “far right” extremism — despite Islamists comprising 80 percent of Counter-Terror Police’s open cases. Whether or not Rudakubana was motivated by Islam, the materials he possessed may have led him to be flagged earlier by a Prevent programme which was paying adequate attention. 

Had the priorities of Prevent not been altered to avoid offending Muslim activists, the lives of David Amess, the girls in Southport, and many others might have been saved. But to distract from the failures of multiculturalism, and their complicity in pushing such policies, Starmer, Cooper, and the media continue to use the Southport murders as a pretext to censor online speech. David Amess’ death spawned calls for “David’s Law” — with MPs who called themselves his friends behaving as if he had been killed by a tweet. The same goes for Axel Rudakubana. Starmer used the riots to convene a summit of censors, pushing for emergency powers to suppress “online misinformation”. Now, new counter-terrorism powers have been proposed: focusing not on clear signs of Islamist radicalisation, but rather nebulously on “dealing with people obsessed by violence but not ideology.” This erroneously presupposes that decentralised, online radicalisation does not serve the goals of a larger organisation. ISIS, for example, use “liminal warfare” tactics, such as orchestrating spontaneous “lone wolf” attacks to create an unpredictable pattern of terror across the West. The state’s recalcitrance to blame a broader terror network or ideology may leave them incapable of preventing future attacks. Meanwhile, a public inquiry will be used to prolong the release of information — with the hopes that apathy will set in over time, and dampen calls for Starmer’s resignation.

The Labour government shows no willingness to be transparent with the public, or learn the right lessons from Rudakubana’s brutal murders. Many will feel that a refusal to be honest about Rudakubana’s motives is another injustice, atop the prospect that this remorseless killer may leave prison someday. Just like for the girls abused by Pakistani gangs in fifty towns and cities across Britain, justice for Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King, and all Rudakubana’s other victims, will be delayed for the sake of Diversity.