ONE YEAR ON

NICK LOWLES

Shortly after 11am on the morning of 29 July 2024, 18-year-old Alex Rudakubana left his home in Banks, West Lancashire, and took a taxi to a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport. There, he “systematically” began stabbing young girls as they sat making friendship bracelets and singing along to Swift’s music. Those that could, fled the building, but others were tragically not so lucky.

Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, died while eight other children and two adults – dance class leader Leanne Lucas and businessman Jonathan Hayes – were seriously wounded.

The intensity of the attack was evident from the wounds left on the young girls. Bebe King had been subjected to 122 knife wounds, while Elsie Dot Stancombe had 85. The prosecution told the jury how Rudakubana had gloated about the attacks as he was escorted through Copy Lane police station after his arrest – saying he was “glad the children were dead”.

As news of the attack spread, so the far-right rumour mill went into overdrive. Grief quickly turned to anger and rage. By nightfall, an account called the ‘European Conservative’ had posted on X that ‘a migrant stabbed numerous children at a holiday nursery’. The misogynist former kickboxing champion and social media influencer Andrew Tate told his three million followers on X, in a post that was viewed over twelve million times, that ‘an undocumented migrant decided to go into a Taylor Swift dance class today and stab six little girls’. A largely unknown online news outlet, Channel3Now, which made its money by aggregating crime news and social media posts, claimed the attacker was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK on a small boat the previous year and was on an MI6 watchlist.

Presumably referencing some of this disinformation, Farage waded in: ‘I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us,’ he posted on X. ‘I don’t know the answer to that: I think it’s a fair and legitimate question.’

Two social media posts gained local traction. The first was from Eddie Murray, who lived near Southport, who posted on LinkedIn just three hours after the attack:

“My two youngest children went to holiday club this morning in Southport for a day of fun only for a migrant to enter and murder/fatally wound multiple children. My kids are fine. They are shocked and in hysterics, but they are safe. My thoughts are with the other 30 kids and families that are suffering right now.

“If there’s any time to close the borders completely it’s right now! Enough is enough.”

A few months later, Stephen Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, claimed that Rudakubana had converted to Islam and was attending Muslim prayers in prison. He claimed first-hand knowledge, as they were in the same wing together.

Of course, Rudakubana was not a Muslim, had not arrived in the UK in a small boat and the attack was not Islamist terrorism. It was, however, part of a new emerging terrorist centred on the desire to commit extreme violence.

In the United States, this has become the most common form of domestic terrorism in the last few years, leading the FBI to deploy a new term to describe it – Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE).

According to the FBI, NVE refers to ‘individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability’.

While Rudakubana did download Al Qaeda manuals, he also sought out information on the IRA, the London Bridge terror attack, and had expressed an interest in school shootings. In fact, five years before the Southport murders, he was referred to Prevent after making comments about a mass shooting.

When police later searched his computer and digital devices, they found images from conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Korea, as well as copious academic material relating to war and genocide. His search history revealed an interest in Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Somalia, and Rwanda, and slavery.

Worryingly, Rudakubana is not alone in seeking extreme violence. Nicholas Prosper, the 19-year-old who was sentenced to 49 years’ imprisonment for murdering three members of his family in Luton in 2024. Prosper had planned to go and kill people at a local school and told police on his arrest that he wanted to be known as the most famous school-shooter of the twenty-first century.

We have also seen the emergence of the online network called ‘764’, that revels in violence and suffering for its own sake (often against women) and operates across hundreds of online chat rooms in Europe and North America. In 2024, two British teenagers linked to the group were convicted under terrorism legislation, and at least two others have been arrested.

Those convicted included Cameron Finnigan, who was just 19 when he was convicted of preparing to murder a homeless man living in a tent near his home in Horsham, West Sussex. He was also found guilty of trying to manipulate a young woman into killing herself. The other was Vincent Charlton, 17, who was jailed for terrorism offences and having videos of a girl cutting his name into her body in 2023. A Swedish chapter took on the slogan ‘No Lives Matter’, while in Germany, 17-year-old German teenager named Nino Luciano went much further. A video uploaded to Discord and then spread across “gore” websites shows him walking up to a 74-year-old woman, saying “Hello” to her, and then stabbing her to death.

The British police have been slow to understand the changing terror threat. Just like their lack of understanding about the post-organisational nature of the far right, the growing appeal of extreme violence amongst a small group of young men, drawing inspiration from multiple and different forms of terrorist ideologies appears to have caught the authorities by surprise. Perhaps if they had been more aware of this new threat, the repeated referrals of Rudakubana to Prevent would not have been ignored.

While the Southport murders were a graphic example of the new threat we face, the public also remain unaware. The far right narrative that Rudakubana was a Muslim, coupled with our own stereotypes about modern terrorism, has permeated society. A poll conducted by HOPE not hate in the spring found 49% of people believing that Rudakubana was an “Islamist extreme”, with just 15% of people believing he was not.