Axel Rudakubana’s fascination with extreme violence stretched back years – students at his school said he had a “kill list” of people he wanted to target.
He was excluded from secondary school in year nine after taking a knife into Range High, in Formby, in October 2019.
Three months later he returned to the Merseyside school and ran along the corridors trying to attack people with a hockey stick.
Rudakubana, who pleaded guilty to the Southport attacks on Monday, had drawn up a list of people he wanted to target.
Between December 2019 and April 2021, he was referred three times to the government’s Prevent programme, designed to intervene and stop people from becoming radicalised.
Students at Range High remember a troubled individual.
Dylan Pemberton’s daughter was three school years above Rudakubana but was still very aware of him.
Mr Pemberton told Sky News: “I asked her, ‘Did you know the kid?’
“And she was like ‘Yeah, he was well known’.”
“He had tried to attack someone with a hockey stick outside my maths class.
“It was known to her and her peer group that he had a kill list.”
Merseyside Police said officers found that the teenager had an “unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”.
Rudakubana also developed a fascination with despotic leaders and warfare, and had also discussed the 1994 Rwandan genocide in the country his parents had lived in before moving to the UK in 2002.
His mother and father had settled in Cardiff, where their two sons were born, before moving to the northwest of England.
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A week before the Southport stabbings in July 2024 his father Alphonse had stopped his son from taking a taxi back to Range High School, five years after he had been excluded.
Then 17, he was wearing the same outfit and surgical mask that he wore before he took another taxi into Southport to attack children at the Taylor Swift-themed dance event.
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Mr Pemberton told Sky News it was chilling to think Rudakubana could have attacked the school the week before.
“If someone is known to be a psychopathic lunatic who has got delusions about wanting to go and massacre people you would hope they (the authorities) would just deal with it.
“It sounds like it was a tragedy waiting to happen… it’s just been kicked into the long grass for someone else to deal with down the line.”
“Why wasn’t he stopped? He was clearly on the radar of school, and social services and at least his father. So how’s he fallen through the cracks and that’s what people want to know.
“We’re all upset and saddened by it, but it really is inconsequential compared to the victims who’ve suffered the real trauma in all of this, you know, for the rest of their lives.
Read more:
Did PM withhold details about attacks?
Survivor reflects on Southport attacks
Stabbings were ‘savage and senseless’
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Announcing a public inquiry into what went wrong, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Between them, those agencies failed to identify the terrible risk and danger to others that he posed.
“We also need more independent answers on both Prevent and all the other agencies that came into contact with this extremely violent teenager as well as answers on how he came to be so dangerous.”
Sefton Council told Sky News that the schools he attended would not yet be commenting.
