The UK’s most senior police officer has warned thousands of young men are obsessed with violence in the wake of the Southport killings.
Metropolitan Police Chief Constable Sir Mark Rowley said many are lost in their bedrooms “grazing” on an online diet of school shootings, beheadings and terrorist propaganda.
He said the “horrific” Southport attack carried out by Axel Rudakubana is not classed as an act of terrorism under current law.
Following the 18-year-old’s guilty pleas over the mass stabbing, Sir Keir Starmer said he would look at changing the law to recognise the “new and dangerous threat” of lone attackers not driven by one ideology.
Sir Mark told LBC radio the review will need to look at the risk posed by those who are obsessed with violence.
“There are thousands of young men online who are obsessing about violence,” he said during a live phone-in on Nick Ferrari’s Breakfast show.
“They are bouncing between videos of school shootings, other gruesome acts – some of it by terrorist groups, some of it nothing at all to do with terrorist groups – and it’s the obsession with violence that is driving some young men to do horrific matters.”
He said the extremism material available legally online is “deeply disturbing” and more difficult to get removed.
“If you are lost in your bedroom and you’re grazing on a diet of American school shooting materials, ISIS beheadings, extreme right-wing propaganda… material that gives you tactics for use of knives and building explosives, it’s horrific and that shouldn’t be in kids’ bedrooms, but it is,” he said.
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Liverpool Crown Court heard how Rudakubana, 18, was obsessed with violence, mass killings and genocide and owned an al Qaida training manual with instructions on how to carry out knife and ricin attacks.
He had been referred three times by schools to the government’s anti-extremism Prevent programme between 2019 and 2021 over concerns about his interest in school shootings, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and the London Bridge attacks.
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He also had repeated contact with police – including for carrying knives – the courts, the justice system and mental health services in the years before he carried out the attack, aged 17.
A public inquiry has been announced into how the state failed to recognise the risk Rudakubana posed and Sir Mark said the “system has failed”.
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But he added: “We’re never going to stop every young violent man. We need to be as good as possible at it, and there are too many men, young men, online, obsessing about this violent material.”
On Thursday. Rudakubana was jailed for life with a minimum term of 52 years for the murder of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July.
He was also sentenced on Monday after admitting 10 attempted murders, possession of a knife, producing ricin and having a version of an al Qaida manual.
Sentencing him, the judge Mr Justice Goose said he would’ve been given a whole life term if he had been nine days older and that he must accept the attack was not an act of terrorism because he didn’t have a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
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But he said: “His culpability for this extreme level of violence is equivalent in its seriousness to terrorist murders, whatever his purpose.
“Whether his motivation was for terrorism or not misses the point.
“What he did on 29 July last year has caused such shock and revulsion to the whole nation, that it must be viewed as being at the extreme level of crime.”
