A British counterterrorism program prematurely closed the case of Axel Rudakubana, a teenager who killed three young girls in a stabbing attack last year, according to an official review published on Wednesday.
The review into the actions of the program, Prevent, which tries to divert vulnerable individuals from becoming terrorists, was commissioned by the government shortly after Mr. Rudakubana carried out a brutal rampage at a dance class in the northern English town of Southport on July 29.
Mr. Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, had been referred three times to Prevent, when he was 13 and 14, because of his fixation on violence. But on each occasion, it was found that he did not meet the threshold for further intervention under the program, in part because he had no known ideology.
The review said that the multiple referrals for Mr. Rudakubana over a 17-month period, combined with his “high levels of susceptibility,” “should have warranted increased scrutiny.”
In a statement to Parliament on Wednesday, Dan Jarvis, the security minister, said that the review had found that there was “sufficient risk for the perpetrator to have been managed through Prevent.” He added: “It found that the referral was closed prematurely and there was sufficient concern to keep the case active while further information was collected.”
Mr. Rudakubana was sentenced to life in prison in late January after pleading guilty to three charges of murder, 10 charges of attempted murder and other charges.
Three young girls, Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, were killed and eight other children and two adults were injured in the July attack, which investigators said was premeditated.
Mr. Rudabukana’s referrals to Prevent were made by education providers between December 2019 and April 2021.
He had also come into contact with the police, the courts, social services and mental health services in the years before the attack. Investigators said that he appeared to have no particular ideology but was obsessed with violence and genocide, as evidenced by the wide range of ultraviolent images, videos and documents found on his digital devices after the attack.
He had made ricin, a lethal toxin, and stored it under his bed, and had downloaded a PDF file titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual,” which investigators believe he had used for instructions on knife and poison attacks.
While the report published Wednesday is the first to address what Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain has called “grave questions” about how the state failed the victims of the Southport attack and their families, it will not be the last.
Yvette Cooper, Britain’s home secretary, has announced a public inquiry into how Mr. Rudakubana “came to be so dangerous” and why the Prevent scheme “failed to identify the terrible risk” he posed.
She acknowledged that in recent years, a growing number of teenagers had been referred to the program Prevent and that “we need to face up to why this has been happening and what needs to change.”
That broader public inquiry into the attack is likely to take months or longer to be completed.
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