SOUTHPORT, NORTHWEST ENGLAND — A United Kingdom public inquiry found that the July 29, 2024, knife attack that killed three girls at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class in Southport, northwest England, could have been prevented. The attack by 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana killed three girls, aged six, seven, and nine, and wounded 10 other people.

The inquiry, led by Sir Adrian Fulford, heard evidence over nine weeks to examine how Rudakubana was able to carry out the attack despite being known to multiple public agencies. "This attack could have been — and should have been — prevented," Fulford, who headed the inquest, wrote in the report. He wrote that the attacker's trajectory toward grave violence was signposted repeatedly and unambiguously but that agencies failed to act with cohesion, urgency, or clarity.

From 2019 onward, Rudakubana was in and out of contact with authorities, including police, social services, education, and health care. He was referred multiple times to Prevent, the U.K.'s counterextremism program, after concerns about his fixation on violence, including school shootings and mass casualty attacks. The inquiry found a lack of clarity over whether Prevent should handle individuals with a fascination with violence but no fixed ideology and concluded it was the wrong decision not to pursue further action in his case.

Fulford wrote that institutions repeatedly passed the risk to others and closed or downgraded their involvement. He also wrote that if the full extent of the family's concerns had been shared among agencies, the tragedy almost certainly would have been prevented. The report criticized the attacker's family for creating obstructions to constructive engagement with authorities. Six days before the attack, clinicians from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services concluded that Rudakubana posed no risk to others.

The report described incidents in which Rudakubana brought a knife to school multiple times and carried out a violent attack with a hockey stick. It also identified failures to monitor or intervene in his online activity as his interest in violence escalated. Materials recovered from his devices included an al Qaeda training manual, anti-Muslim and antisemitic material, and documents on multiple conflicts, including the genocide in Rwanda. Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Rwandan parents, is serving a prison sentence of at least 52 years after pleading guilty to three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder, and terrorism-related offenses.

The inquiry found repeated failures in information-sharing between government agencies, with risk details lost or diluted over time. Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to make fundamental changes in response to the inquiry's findings.

Independent Prevent Commissioner David Anderson said that while referrals to Prevent used to come mainly from Islamist and extreme right-wing individuals, increasingly younger individuals are absorbing extreme ideas online. "They don't necessarily follow any particular ideology or conspiracy theory, but have a fascination with violence, school shootings and massacres, whoever is perpetrating them," he said. The inquiry will enter a second phase examining why a growing number of young people are being drawn toward extreme violence without a clear ideological framework.