Axel Rudakubana was referred to the counter-extremism scheme PREVENT three times.

 

“He used computers at the school he attended at the time to search for material on school massacres.

 

Two years later, in 2021, he was referred again to Prevent after viewing material on Libya and past terrorist attacks, including those on London in 2017.

 

The material is understood to have consisted of news articles, and at the time he was assessed by Prevent, officials did not have any information that he was viewing or searching for extremist material.

 

He was judged three times not to pose a terrorism risk, and was thus outside the scope of the scheme.”

 

Very unsurprising news. Authorities fail in their job, leading to a horrendous attack. Then you get this cultural backlash which essentially takes the heat off them when it’s entirely their fault. No 17 yr old wakes up and attacks a bunch of little kids without tons of warning signs previously. They also need to alter the law to reveal such perpetrators identity quicker too. This guy was a few weeks away from his 18th birthday and they allowed speculation to run wild instead of just being upfront with the full truth.

Very unsurprising news. Authorities fail in their job, leading to a horrendous attack. Then you get this cultural backlash which essentially takes the heat off them when it’s entirely their fault. No 17 yr old wakes up and attacks a bunch of little kids without tons of warning signs previously. They also need to alter the law to reveal such perpetrators identity quicker too. This guy was a few weeks away from his 18th birthday and they allowed speculation to run wild instead of just being upfront with the full truth.

That's potentially the start of a slippery slope. You move from "only a few weeks short of their 18th birthday" to "only a few months" and so on.

 

As for Prevent, do you know how many people are referred each day? Do you know how many might have had similar reasons for referral to this attacker, yet go on to lead perfectly crime-free lives? Identifying potential offenders without taking action against perfectly innocent people is not easy. If it was, there would be countries who had succeeded in doing so and we could copy their methods.

It is a failure of Prevent - but that's in part because we have a narrow definition of terrorism, and what he did was clearly designed for terrorism but it doesn't come under Prevent's remit.

 

It's been acknowledged by the government, hopefully this will get it looked at.

 

The positive news is that he pleaded guilty so there's not much standing in the way of giving him possibly one of the longest sentences in British history.

Starmer's read my posts! He's approaching this from a standpoint of expanding the definition of terrorism, which is very good.

 

He's also called for an inquiry into it, and correctly reasserted that he could not give out information still under investigation at the time, though I'm sure all his uncharitable critics will come up with a new reason for why him calling an inquiry this time is a cover-up and why following our legally defined processes of justice is bad actually.

Yeah it’s obviously nonsense. We’ve always had information about terrorist very quickly from Lee rigby to Manchester. Lucy Letby wouldn’t be in prison if this was the standard. The idea that somebody caught in the act in daylight with every piece of evidence possible would walk free if we knew he has a history of violence is so absurd I do wonder where youre coming from because we are entering a twilight zone at this point.

 

Starmer of course is not going to read the room as he’s unable to but for him to use Southport to prop himself up as dealing with grooming gangs when it’s well established he has huge failures and he won’t give a public inquiry is astonishingly tone deaf too. According to Starmer it’s social media censorship that we need from this? Again he’s had a long history of this dating back to when he tried to prosecute a guy for a joke online and famous comedians had to help the guy win in court. He’s just not a man with an iota of common sense.

 

Also I’m still unsure why they used a picture of him at 9 repeatedly when they had a recent mugshot? Very odd things that seem very unnecessary. The terrorism thing almost a red herring really. Authorities failing from the night stalker to every terrorist or killer you can think of is very common in the UK and often it’s due to too much regulation. You needed someone with any common sense to say this guy is a ticking timebomb where can we put him until he’s mentally sane. Not one social worker passing him off to another with police not sure what to do and another group saying he doesn’t quite fit our criteria.

Yeah it’s obviously nonsense. We’ve always had information about terrorist very quickly from Lee rigby to Manchester. Lucy Letby wouldn’t be in prison if this was the standard. The idea that somebody caught in the act in daylight with every piece of evidence possible would walk free if we knew he has a history of violence is so absurd I do wonder where youre coming from because we are entering a twilight zone at this point.

 

Starmer of course is not going to read the room as he’s unable to but for him to use Southport to prop himself up as dealing with grooming gangs when it’s well established he has huge failures and he won’t give a public inquiry is astonishingly tone deaf too. According to Starmer it’s social media censorship that we need from this? Again he’s had a long history of this dating back to when he tried to prosecute a guy for a joke online and famous comedians had to help the guy win in court. He’s just not a man with an iota of common sense.

 

Also I’m still unsure why they used a picture of him at 9 repeatedly when they had a recent mugshot? Very odd things that seem very unnecessary. The terrorism thing almost a red herring really. Authorities failing from the night stalker to every terrorist or killer you can think of is very common in the UK and often it’s due to too much regulation. You needed someone with any common sense to say this guy is a ticking timebomb where can we put him until he’s mentally sane. Not one social worker passing him off to another with police not sure what to do and another group saying he doesn’t quite fit our criteria.

 

You’ve been consumed by so much far right nonsense. “Too much regulation” - no, it actually shows the regulation did its job indentifying someone who could pose a threat. There’s a failure of the agencies involved of course, but that’s for an investigation to establish what went wrong locally. That may come down to a lack of countability, but again, it will come down to these resources being severely underfunded. There’s no magic fix.

 

I’m fairly certain in legal terms the media are not allowed to report with police mugshots in this country too when there’s a trial involved.

The racism in this case is insane, as well as people using it as just another excuse to rant about their existing prejudices.

 

For example, there's a news story reporting that his father - a first gen immigrant - was able to prevent him from doing this in a school the day prior - which would have had a much larger total number of potential victims.

So that would be a case of heroism by an immigrant and proof that despite being an immigrant, he clearly has values that DON'T align with mass child murder.

But that keeps getting left out of the articles or it all bundled in as evidence that the perpetrator had no good influences at home/culturally because he still was able to achieve SOME murder.

 

Re terrorism, once again. Evidence of ideology is needed for that crime. Someone who was just a violence addict who wanted to harm for harm's sake or notoriety isn't a terrorist, legally speaking. That doesn't make them not a murderer or not someone that should be locked up away from any chance of offending again, it's just a terminology difference - yet people are out here acting like not using the word is 'defending/excusing' terrorism instead of just being accurate wrt language and the law of the country.

Yeah it’s obviously nonsense. We’ve always had information about terrorist very quickly from Lee rigby to Manchester. Lucy Letby wouldn’t be in prison if this was the standard. The idea that somebody caught in the act in daylight with every piece of evidence possible would walk free if we knew he has a history of violence is so absurd I do wonder where youre coming from because we are entering a twilight zone at this point.

 

Starmer of course is not going to read the room as he’s unable to but for him to use Southport to prop himself up as dealing with grooming gangs when it’s well established he has huge failures and he won’t give a public inquiry is astonishingly tone deaf too. According to Starmer it’s social media censorship that we need from this? Again he’s had a long history of this dating back to when he tried to prosecute a guy for a joke online and famous comedians had to help the guy win in court. He’s just not a man with an iota of common sense.

 

Also I’m still unsure why they used a picture of him at 9 repeatedly when they had a recent mugshot? Very odd things that seem very unnecessary. The terrorism thing almost a red herring really. Authorities failing from the night stalker to every terrorist or killer you can think of is very common in the UK and often it’s due to too much regulation. You needed someone with any common sense to say this guy is a ticking timebomb where can we put him until he’s mentally sane. Not one social worker passing him off to another with police not sure what to do and another group saying he doesn’t quite fit our criteria.

Obeying the law is not a matter of "reading the room". The PMs of the day will have had intelligence information about the killers of MPs Jo Cos and David Amess. They kept it to themselves. There was no post-trial outcry and no howls of "cover-up". That's because there was no cover-up in any of these cases.

Yeah it’s obviously nonsense. We’ve always had information about terrorist very quickly from Lee rigby to Manchester. Lucy Letby wouldn’t be in prison if this was the standard. The idea that somebody caught in the act in daylight with every piece of evidence possible would walk free if we knew he has a history of violence is so absurd I do wonder where youre coming from because we are entering a twilight zone at this point.

 

Starmer of course is not going to read the room as he’s unable to but for him to use Southport to prop himself up as dealing with grooming gangs when it’s well established he has huge failures and he won’t give a public inquiry is astonishingly tone deaf too. According to Starmer it’s social media censorship that we need from this? Again he’s had a long history of this dating back to when he tried to prosecute a guy for a joke online and famous comedians had to help the guy win in court. He’s just not a man with an iota of common sense.

 

Also I’m still unsure why they used a picture of him at 9 repeatedly when they had a recent mugshot? Very odd things that seem very unnecessary. The terrorism thing almost a red herring really. Authorities failing from the night stalker to every terrorist or killer you can think of is very common in the UK and often it’s due to too much regulation. You needed someone with any common sense to say this guy is a ticking timebomb where can we put him until he’s mentally sane. Not one social worker passing him off to another with police not sure what to do and another group saying he doesn’t quite fit our criteria.

 

Rooney and Suedehead said as much already but this is classic 'everything proves the conspiracy' nonsense. The laws around reporting the Southport case were followed duly and that does mean that people get information a little later than they might like. I would never expect nor want the sitting PM to do anything like release information that might pervert the cause of justice (very important this is not done for a jury trial!), especially as he had been in power for less than a month at that point.

 

This is what I mean about uncharitability, Labour have called an inquiry into the historic failures that led to the Southport killer not properly being assessed by Prevent, something that does need a fresh look, while you, or whoever's information you're parroting berates the government for doing their duty and covering up details, and yet when it was about a well-known issue like grooming gangs that has had multiple inquiries over the last decades we had screeching from the rafters calling for yet another one that only slightly relented when Labour announced some local ones to cover any gaps. Reform supporters/bots are doing this all over Twitter and they look insane.

 

By all means criticise the government but actually take notice when they do things or you just look ridiculous, that's how most of us here operated for 14 years under the incompetency of the Conservatives, if there was something right they did it was accepted.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1w29n0l7o

 

In the aftermath of the Southport knife attack there was a sense of national trauma over the killings of three girls at a summer holiday dance and yoga class. Seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King who was six, and nine-year-old Alice Aguiar were murdered. Eight other children were badly injured.

Anger and disbelief soon followed, prompting burning questions over the identity, background and possible motive of the attacker, and suspicions about why the authorities appeared to be saying a lot less than they knew.

Despite public demands for information, the police provided few details about the attacker. There was very little information in their statements about his background. He was not even named because he was 17 at the time of the attack. One thing was made public early on - it was not being treated as terror-related by the authorities.

The UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has told BBC Panorama that he believes the quality and quantity of information released by the authorities in the hours after the attack on 29 July 2024 was "inadequate".

"People got the sense that something was being withheld or fudged in some way, and that led the social media types who wanted to spread disinformation to spread disinformation," Jonathan Hall KC said

 

 

Surprisingly a good review. One of my main gripes in life in general is people taking decisions that lack all common sense. It was very clear more information was needed after such an attack. When you commit a certain level of crime your age should go out the window too. Whether this guy was 17 or 18 really makes little difference with a crime like this

I’m not sure giving the public more information right there and then would have changed anything. The morons still would have rioted no matter what information was at their disposal.

On 24/02/2025 at 17:00, Liam sota said:

 

It was very clear more information was needed after such an attack.

For who? Why?

6 minutes ago, J00prstar said:

For who? Why?

There is an article there

1 minute ago, Liam sota said:

There is an article there

Explain how you think things would have panned out differently if this information had all been released. Try and do so without saying ‘here’s an article’.

Just now, T Boy said:

Explain how you think things would have panned out differently if this information had all been released. Try and do so without saying ‘here’s an article’.

He asked a question that was already clearly answered.

That’s why I posted the review link. Since I agree with the conclusion. It answers this question so I’m just assuming you both didn’t bother reading.

Transparency helps. It takes the power from bad faith actors. Humans can handle good and bad news but they cannot handle not knowing something.

Also there are many layers to attacks like these and deep history. Cover ups have been a fundamental running aspect in them.

But my point is that nothing would have changed at all if the information had been released. The riots would still have happened. The racists on the far right would still be racist thugs. They would still have found a reason to do what they did, they were waiting for one.

You haven’t responded to that point at all. The article you’re hiding behind doesn’t address it directly either.

28 minutes ago, T Boy said:

But my point is that nothing would have changed at all if the information had been released. The riots would still have happened. The racists on the far right would still be racist thugs. They would still have found a reason to do what they did, they were waiting for one.

You haven’t responded to that point at all. The article you’re hiding behind doesn’t address it directly either.

Ok that’s your assumption. Who knows.

What we do know is that a variety of bad faith actors used the void in information to push inflammatory narratives and this led to a spiral of events.

I think people would be a lot less reactive when such things happen if they trust the authorities are dealing with it, are actually on the right side. They are doing everything possible to stop such attacks and protect people. If the feeling is that they’re not and they’re covering up attacks and protecting perpetrators then what are people supposed to do? Just sit back and allow that? Just look the other way? That creates real anger of needing to do something. So that’s why they created the complete wrong perception by limiting information

But you're the one who's leading with paranoia.

If you had just trusted the authorities in the first place that would also have nixed the situation.

Your argument is that we can never trust authorities no matter what they do and so they should always go out of their way to - in this case - share real-time updates of a criminal investigation into a minor who can't be named or identified due to age, with the general public.

And yet when the suspect was named and his background revealed, the riots carried on. And people tried to trap people in hotels with fire. You cannot spin that these people would have held back if they had all the information.

In fact, when it was revealed that he had been researching terrorist methods, those people started bleating ‘we were right!’ as if it justified their crimes. So having that information possible would have made them go in harder.

Of course it’s harder to extinguish a fire once it has started. And yeah they were right, they covered up vital information.

Distrust in authorities has been the primary factor in most riots. If you look at the prison riots. Even BLM in the US. A similar thing in the UK too with that guy shot in London. A way to quell distrust is transparency.

Without doing that it only increases anger and the mentality to take matters into their own hands or protest.