Anti-terror strategy failed to stop a killer

Southport attacker's lack of coherent ideology meant the Prevent scheme did not see him as a potential risk, exposing the need for reform

- Lizzie Dearden

Seven years before Axel Rudakubana launched the Southport attack, a new category was quietly added into the UK's Prevent counterterrorism scheme. Labelled "mixed, unstable or unclear ideology", it aimed to cover a growing number of cases where people had been flagged as a potential security threat but did not fit into existing boxes, such as Islamist or far-right extremism.

"In cases such as these, the individual may not have a coherent or single ideology, but may still pose a terrorism risk," said an official bulletin announcing the change in 2017, warning of a significant increase in these kinds of cases. By the time a 13-year-old Rudakubana was flagged to Prevent in November 2019, more than half of all referrals to the scheme were put in the "mixed, unstable or unclear ideology" bracket, and the proportion was even greater for cases involving children.

On 29 July last year, Rudakubana walked into a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport, north-west England, and stabbed 11 children and two adults, killing Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven. He was jailed last week for a minimum of 52 years. Rudakubana, now 18, refused to appear in the dock as the judge said he would probably "never be released and he will be in custody for all his life".

Former senior counter-terrorism police officers have now raised concerns that the Prevent programme is not capable of handling mounting threats from individuals such as Rudakubana, who may be obsessed with violence but lack the ideological motivation required to meet the UK's legal definition of terrorism.