The 18-year-old pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls in frenzied knife rampage in Southport last Summer. He has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 52 years.
A teenager who murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in England has been sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison.
Judge Julian Goose said 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana “wanted to try and carry out mass murder of innocent, happy young girls” and that “it is likely he will never be released.”
The judge said that he couldn’t impose a sentence of life without parole, because Rudakabana was under 18 at the time of the cowardly and vicious attack, and the fact that he pleaded guilty earlier this week.
Rudakbuana was 17 when he attacked the children in the seaside town of Southport in July. During the attack, which was carried out in space of 15 minutes, he killed Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, and wounded eight other children and two adults.
One of the dead girls had 122 injuries, while another suffered 85 wounds.
Rudakubana was led into the dock at Liverpool Crown Court in northwest England, dressed in a gray prison tracksuit as a judge prepared to sentence him. But as prosecutors began outlining the evidence, Rudakubana interrupted by shouting from the dock that he felt ill and wanted to see a paramedic.
Judge Julian Goose urged lawyers to continue, then ordered the accused to be removed when he continued shouting. A person in the courtroom shouted “Coward!” as Rudakubana was taken out.
The hearing continued without him.
The court was shown video of Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time, arriving at the Hart Space venue in a taxi and entering the building. Within seconds, screams erupted and children ran from the building in panic, some of them wounded. One girl made it to the doorway, but was pulled back inside by the attacker. She was stabbed 32 times but survived.
Several relatives and survivors read emotional statements in court about the impact of the attack.
A 14-year-old survivor, who can’t be named because of a court order, described her serious injuries and said that while she was physically recovering. “We will all have to live with the mental pain from that day forever.”
“I hope you spend the rest of your life knowing that we think you’re a coward,” she said.
The prosecutor read out a statement from the parents of Alice Da Silva Aguiar, who said their daughter’s killing had “shattered our souls.”
“We used to cook for three. Now we only cook for two. It doesn’t seem right,” they said. “Alice was our purpose for living, so what do we do now?”
The government has announced a public inquiry into how the system failed to stop the killer, who had been referred to the authorities multiple times over his obsession with violence.
He was referred three times to the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, when he was 13 and 14 – once after researching school shootings in class, then for uploading pictures of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to Instagram and for researching a London terror attack.
The government has declared the case a wake-up call and ordered a public inquiry into the failures that allowed Rudakubana to carry out his rampage.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that laws might need updating to combat a “new threat” from violent individuals whose mix of motivations test the traditional definition of terrorism, “acts of extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms.”
