Axel Rudakubana’s rampage took just 12 minutes – but the effects of it will scar a community for decades.
The teenager – dressed in a green hoodie pulled up over his head and a surgical mask, despite the warm weather – arrived in a taxi outside the Hart Space in Southport.
Rudukubana stayed silent throughout the journey and refused to pay the driver upon arrival. A member of the public confronted him and told him to pay, to which the teenager responded: ‘What are you going to do about it?’
On that horror July day last year, he was seen on CCTV entering the dance studio at 11.45am. At the time, the children were making bracelets and singing along to music. Because it was a warm day, a teacher opened a window and saw Rudakubana outside, but thought nothing of it.
The young girls were enjoying a Taylor Swift-themed dance and craft day, but within 30 seconds of Rudukubana entering, screams could be heard.
As the children tried to flee, the then-17-year-old pulled one girl back and dragged her inside. He stabbed others in the back as they ran from him.
There were 26 children in the first-floor dance studio with teachers Leanne Lucas and Heidi Liddle when the murderer burst in with the 20-inch knife he had bought for just a few pounds on Amazon.
Without saying a word, he grabbed the nearest child before moving through the room, knifing 11 children in total. The injuries to Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were so severe they died inside the building.
Rudakubana also stabbed Ms Lucas and businessman Jonathan Hayes, who was working next door and tried to intervene. Ms Liddle grabbed one girl and hid in a toilet.
Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, ran outside with other children and got in a parent’s car but collapsed. She died in hospital the next morning. The first police officer arrived to find Rudakubana at the top of the stairs holding a large, bloodied kitchen knife, which he dropped.
He was standing over the body of Bebe King. Police then found little Elsie’s body inside the building. Police found Ms Liddle and a girl she had protected hiding in the toilets, both crying in fear.
Less than an hour earlier, Rudakubana had searched online for details of an attack on a bishop and priest in last April. He then deleted his browsing history. The attack in a suburb of Sydney, left Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and a fellow priest at an Orthodox Assyrian church with stab wounds. A boy of 16 was arrested and both clergymen survived.
Examination of Rudakubana’s tablet computers revealed an interest in war and conflict across the world – including Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the Mau Mau War in Kenya, the activities of Nazi Germany, the Crimean War and even 17th century violence.
Rudakubana, raised a Christian, also downloaded books, images, academic papers, leaflets and manuals which related to war, weapons and genocide – plus tales of torture and beheadings. He also obtained information on remote-controlled detonators and acid.
He discovered how to make ricin after downloading a document called Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual. Possession of it is a terrorism offence.
He bought the equipment to produce ricin in early 2022. He later bought two Cerebra 20-inch kitchen knives on Amazon for £3.40 each – one of which was used on July 29. The second was found in his family’s living room.
Although the sale of knives is banned to under-18s, he obscured his identity and asked for deliveries to be ‘made in plain packaging’. A machete and scabbard, a set of arrows and a black holdall were also found.
A ‘suspicious substance’ found at his home in the early days of the search was confirmed to be ricin by experts at Porton Down on August 2 but the risk to the public was deemed ‘low to very low’. There was no evidence Rudakubana took any ricin to the dance studio or what his plans were for the substance.
His guilty pleas yesterday took everyone by surprise at Liverpool Crown Court – including his defence team. He had never previously spoken during five earlier hearings – pulling his jumper over his face, ignoring requests to stand and not confirming his name.
Barrister Stan Reiz KC was appointed to appear on his behalf, but he had not engaged with his defence team. But yesterday morning, Rudakubana mumbled guilty pleas to the murders of Bebe, Elsie Dot and Alice.
He also admitted attempting to murder eight more children, Ms Lucas and Mr Hayes, plus further charges of possession of a knife, producing ricin at home and possessing an Al Qaeda training manual. Because the crimes happened nine days before he turned 18, he must be dealt with as a juvenile.
Rudakubana sat with his head bowed as Mr Reiz said he would be presenting ‘a considerable amount of material about the defendant’s mental health’ at Thursday’s sentencing. But Mr Justice Goose warned the killer: ‘It’s inevitable the sentence I will impose upon you will be that of a life sentence equivalent.’
But where did it all begin?
At the age of 11 he was portraying a young Dr Who in a BBC Children in Need advert after being billed as a ‘superstar’ by a talent agency.
Yet just days before his 18th birthday, former ‘model pupil’ Rudakubana was to launch a sickening and deadly rampage against innocent young girls enjoying a summer holiday dance and crafting session.
Urgent questions are now being asked about how a stage-school talent and committed churchgoer could become a ‘generational evil’ branded a ‘ticking timebomb’ with a ‘sickening interest in death’.
With his now matted hair and glazed, staring eyes, it almost defies belief that the man who admitted horrendous crimes from the dock of Liverpool Crown Court is the same boy filmed seven years previous, emerging from the Tardis in David Tennant’s trademark trenchcoat and tie, telling viewers: ‘It’s that time of year again.’
It can now be revealed that the ‘spark’ of his horrifying descent into a hate-filled loner with an insatiable appetite for the gory details of the bloodiest atrocities of the 20th century appear to stem from a knife threat he made aged 13.
In October 2019, shortly after starting Year 9 at Range High School in Formby, Merseyside, Rudakubana – whose devoutly religious parents fled to Britain following the genocide in their native Rwanda – rang Childline to say he was going to bring a knife into classes because he was being bullied.
Having carried out his threat, he was immediately expelled. But out of the blue just two months later came a chilling forewarning of last summer’s savage attack.
Wearing a hooded top, Rudakubana sneaked back on to the school grounds armed with a hockey stick and began attacking children, apparently targeting those who he felt had wronged him.
Fellow pupils recalled their shock at seeing the Cardiff-born teen suddenly push his way inside the building, looking ‘weird’, and ‘went round beating people up’.
‘He only stopped when two teachers managed to get hold of him,’ a classmate said. ‘He never went back to the school and we never heard about him again.
‘When we heard it was Axel who had attacked the dance studio we all said, “Thank goodness it was only a hockey stick he brought in that day”.’
One boy suffered a broken wrist, with Rudakubana given a 10-month referral order by a youth court – believed to be his only prior brush with the law.
Until then he had been a ‘model student’, sources at the school said.
‘The knife incident and then the hockey stick attack seem to have been the start of him becoming obsessed with the most horrific violence, eventually culminating in the attack on the dance studio,’ a source said. ‘That was the spark which started everything.’
Rudakubana never returned to the school, but resentment evidently continued to simmer.
After being expelled, Rudakubana underwent a series of mental-health assessments, during which he was diagnosed with autism.
He never returned to mainstream education, instead being assigned to specialist educational units. But he only attended Presfield High School & Specialist College ‘two or three times’, sources said.
In a measure of how much of a threat he was by now deemed, social workers sent to the family’s cul-de-sac to find out why he wasn’t turning up would only approach with police back-up.
Instead, Rudakubana spent much of his time locked away in his bedroom – searching up the most graphic material to fuel his obsession with genocidal killers and bloody dictators.
In the run-up to last July, he had been ‘unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time’, a previous court hearing was told.
‘He became obsessed with wars, conflicts, genocides and the most appalling atrocities,’ one source said yesterday.
‘Just as some children are fixated on football, they know all the players, all their stats, he was the same about genocidal killers and bloody dictators.
‘If you wanted to know about the IRA’s killing campaign or Colonel Gaddafi’s brutal regime, Rudakubana could tell you all about it.
‘He collected books and literature and read up on it obsessively. The nastier it was, the more interesting he found it.
‘It’s just chilling how he went from being an apparently normal year 9 kid to becoming just uncontrollably evil.’
As a result of his worrying searches he was referred to Prevent and counter-terrorism policing, but this is understood to have been regarded as an element of his mental-health struggles.
Indeed there is no evidence of any physical violence or threats between the hockey stick incident when he was 13 and the dance studio attack last July.
Professionals who worked with Rudakubana stressed he was raised a Catholic and there was no religious motivation around his fixation on violence or the dance studio attack.
‘He had no religious links whatsoever – he was just pure evil and wanted to hurt people,’ a source said. ‘It was as simple as that. I would describe him as generational evil.’
Those who worked with Rudakubana say it is no coincidence that one of the acts of brutality which fascinated him was the 1994 genocide which prompted his parents to flee Rwanda.
As many as 1million people – most from the Rudakubanas’ minority Tutsi community – died in just over 100 days of violence that tore apart the east African nation.
According to Rwandan community members spoken to by the Daily Mail, his father -– who would have been 18 at the time of the genocide – was a soldier in rebel Tutsi army the Rwanda Patriotic Front.
His mother, Laetitia Muzayire, only survived through being sheltered in a church by her family’s Hutu neighbours, a sister later revealed – however an older sister was slaughtered.
‘More than 200 people in my own family had been killed,’ the surviving sister later revealed in an Al Jazeera article. ‘In my mother’s family, there were eight siblings. Only one survived.’
But despite Axel’s interest in the Rwandan genocide, sources who worked with him stressed it was ‘just one of many conflicts that he was fixated by’.
‘There was no ideology behind it, he just wanted to kill as many people as possible,’ one said.
Before the knife incident, Rudakubana was a budding stage star, winning ‘performer of the week’ aged 11 at the Southport branch of Pauline Quirke Academy of Performing Arts, set up by the Birds of a Feather star.
At the same time, Rudakubana was also part of a local youth drama group through which he performed on a West End show at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
The drama group also created ‘their own movie’ which was reportedly shown at a Vue cinema where the children were walked down a red carpet.
Then in 2018, as exclusively revealed by Mail Online, he was cast in the Children in Need clip after being billed as a ‘superstar’ by a talent agency run by a former Premier League footballer’s wife.
Ology Kids Casting based in Ormskirk, Lancashire – close to Southport – is co-run by Laura Beckford, wife of former Everton footballer Jermaine Beckford, and her older brother Andrew.
The 45-second video is understood to have been shot on location in nearby Blackpool.
In it, Rudakubana tells viewers: ‘It’s that time of year again’ before advising on how best to raise money for Children In Need including dressing ‘as every Doctor Who ever’.
Ology has declined to comment, but managers are understood to have been ‘very upset’ at learning of the association.
Meanwhile BBC sources have stressed that Rudakubana never had any ‘affiliation’ with Children In Need projects.
While both his parents were listed as students on their elder son’s birth certificate, when they lived in Cardiff his mother worked for the university’s Dentistry School.
She is also a practising Christian with links to evangelical ministers.
His father was a keen exponent of karate while his older brother is a university maths undergraduate and trombone player who uses a wheelchair.
Former neighbours in Cardiff – which the family left when Axel was seven to move to the North West – recalled his parents as ‘nice, quiet people struggling to make a living after coming from Rwanda’, saying his mother stayed at home with the children.
Following his shock admission of guilt, questions will now focus on what else could have been done to prevent a tragedy which will haunt Southport for generations.
‘The shock of someone so evil living in the heart of the community like that is going to take a long, long time for everyone in the area to comprehend,’ said a source who has worked with him.