Evil Axel Rudakubana ‘left free to butcher three girls despite years on police radar’

Evil Axel Rudakubana was left free to butcher three innocent young girls despite spending years on the radar of police, anti-extremism authorities and multiple other public agencies.

Despite repeated concerns being raised over the twisted teen’s sickening obsession with extreme violence, there was only ever limited intervention.

Prime Minister Sir has acknowledged the “state had failed” as he launched a public inquiry over the repeated missed opportunities to stop Rudakubana’s deadly descent.

Warnings were first raised when he was an 11-year-old year nine pupil at Range High School in Formby, Merseyside. Having appeared in a Children In Need campaign video as Dr Who, he told teachers his dreams of becoming a musical theatre star, but regular outbursts of anger towards classmates seemed at odds with his creative aspirations.

His inner fury grew as he entered puberty with fellow pupils remembering him as “the class weirdo” , obsessed with evil figures such as Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.

He was excluded from Range High School in October 2019 when he took a knife into school. It would later emerge he told Childline call centre he planned to take a knife into school after being a victim of racist bullying.

Having returned to school two months later he attacked another child with a hockey stick before being restrained by staff and being expelled.

Local health workers determined he had an autism spectrum disorder and he was later enrolled in two other schools for children with special needs: The Acorns School and Presfield High School & Specialist College.

He attended sixth form at the latter only for a few days, instead spending much of his time at home gorging in online violence.

Staff made home visits, but frequently requested police accompany teachers due to concerns about his violent behaviour.

Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership said Rudakubana failed to “re-integrate” into education after his exclusion from Range High School, a situation “exacerbated by the pandemic”.

At around the same time it was noted Rudakubana experienced “anxiety which prevented him from leaving his home”.

Having stopped attending school, several local agencies had various levels of contact with Rudakubana and he was convicted of assault and referred to the youth justice service after the incident when he took a knife into school.

He completed rehabilitation activities aimed at young offenders who have pleaded guilty to a first offence.

However, Lancashire Constabulary had “several” further interactions with the teenager between October 2019 and May 2022 – including four calls from his home address relating to concerns about his behaviour.

On each occasion, officers made contact with MASH – a local grouping of agencies tasked with overseeing vulnerable people in the area.

Children’s Social Care carried out an initial assessment into Rudakubana, which found social work support was not required. It recommended “early help”, which covers forms of less intensive intervention.

Contact was made with Rudakubana and his family and they were offered guidance on his “emotional wellbeing and behaviours”.

He was also seen by local mental health services but “stopped engaging” in February 2023 when the future killer was aged 16.

A spokesperson representing local agencies said his “participation and engagement remained a challenge” throughout this period, despite repeated efforts of professionals to engage.

An independent review into whether more could have been done to intervene is now under way.

Rudakubana first came to the attention of the government’s anti-extremism Prevent programme because he had expressed an interest in school shootings, the London Bridge attack, the IRA, MI5 and the Middle East.

He was subsequently referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021 but concerns were never escalated, meaning he was not put under enhanced monitoring.

An urgent Prevent review carried out over the summer found this was because, while there was evidence he had an obsession with violence, he did not appear to fit the mould of a would-be extremist.

There were no signs of any allegiance to a single cause – which is why despite pleading guilty to downloading a terror manual, his case has never been treated as a terror investigation.

His case has prompted concerns over whether Prevent is equipped to identify dangerous people who fall outside the traditional view of what constitutes an extremist.

The urgent review found that, given Rudakubana’s age and complex needs, his case should have been escalated. It concluded Prevent put too much weight on his apparent lack of adherence to a single radical ideology.

When police searched his home, they found a cache of weapons, including a machete, a set of arrows and a sealed box containing an unknown substance. Tests at Porton Down, the government’s biological warfare laboratory, confirmed the substance was ricin, a poison for which there is no cure.

He had attempted to delete his history minutes before leaving his home on July 29, but analysis of his laptop and phone found them jam-packed with vile images from conflicts in Gaza, , Sudan and Korea, as well as copious amounts of academic material relating to genocide.

His search history was dominated by Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Somalia and Rwanda, and slavery.

Detectives also found an American academic study of an al-Qaeda training document, which had been downloaded at least twice since 2021.

It has also emerged that one week before the murders, Rudakubana tried to return to Range High School, the scene of his expulsion five years earlier.

He was wearing the same (death suit” hooded sweatshirt and surgical mask he would wear during the attack the following week, but was prevented from making the journey when his father pleaded with a taxi driver not to take him.

It is not known whether Rudakubana intended to attack people that day but his movements bear a striking similarity to the events of the following week when he would descend on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport and murder defenceless Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine.

On that second occasion, he made sure to book the taxi after leaving the house.