'Why wasn't he stopped?' Southport attacker had 'kill list' and was obsessed with extreme violence
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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.
