A security specialist says the UK needs to learn lessons from school shootings in the US as it seeks to prevent a repeat of the horrific Southport killings.
Former Scotland Yard detective Phillip Grindell, the founder of Defuse Global, also believes a proper behavioural threat assessment should have identified “at least four” prevalent behaviours of concern in Rudakubana’s actions.
Mr Grindell also said there was significant evidence Rudakubana was somebody who should have been looked at continuously, and that somebody who posed a genuine threat.”
The former counter terrorism security coordinator – who is set to release a new book later this year – said: “This young man was identified at a very young age as having serious problems. He was expelled from school and then subsequently, on three separate occasions, referred to an organisation which is there to identify and divert people who are, in their view, on the way to committing terrorist acts.
“This is where I think the first mistake has been made. We know that when he went to Prevent they suggested there was no evidence of him being driven by any ideological motivation.
“There doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that, but there is evidence of some different and more concerning fixated behaviours.
“These people don’t just snap and attack, they follow a process. They brood, they think about things and they dwell, and then they plan what they’re going to do.
And the first phase of that is grievance.
“This is where I think we’ve come into some challenges, because what the Prevent programme were looking at doing is identifying, does he have a terrorist ideology? “The answer is, no, he doesn’t. What he does have is a very, very significant grievance and a fixation of violence, and those grievances may have started from when he was a very young boy, where he says that he was racially abused at school.”
Outlining the impact of bullying he continued: “There is evidence he was bullied at school. Now, when you’re bullied, particularly if you’re publicly bullied, often an emotion that is accompanied to that is one of shame and humiliation, and we know that humiliation is one of the four component parts of a grievance.
“And in fact, shame has been known as the universal motivator.
“When a grievance can’t be resolved, what often happens then in these circumstances is that the person forms a violent ideation. In other words, I can’t resolve my grievance; the only way we’re going to deal with it is by being violent.
“He has previous for this behaviour. We know when he was 13, he talked about taking a knife to school, so therefore he’s already thinking about violence as a method of resolving his grievances.
“We also know that after he was excluded from school, he turned up at school and attacked one of his former bullies with a hockey stick. We can see that he’s got this violent ideation. This is what is known as ‘The Pathway to Intended Violence’.
“We don’t know what was going on behind the closed doors of his family, what the situation was there, and whether violence was a part of their lives or not. We might make some assessment around if his family comes from Rwanda. Did he grow up hearing the stories of what was going on in Rwanda, and did that create some interest or some preconception around violence?
“What we do know is that he planned to attack his school. The previous week, he had made plans to do that, and his father stopped him doing that. If he can attack his school, a school that he knows, then his research may not be that detailed, because he already knows where he’s going. He planned it, but we know that he booked a taxi to take him from home to the school. So, there’s evidence of planning in terms of the actual attack.
Mr Grindell says lessons can be learned from the recent attacks on MPs.
He said: “When I looked at some of the MPs in the UK that were targeted and attacked, very often, I saw evidence of this where they had multiple targets. But they ended up zoning in on the one they attacked. One of the other indicators that’s been talked about is his fixation, often called an obsession, and we know that he had a real fixation on violence, particularly with weapons.
“We also know that he looked and studied in detail organisations like the IRA, Gaddafi, al Qaeda. He had an al Qaeda manual in his possession at home. So, we know that he studied these and there’s evidence of this being identified quite early on his obsession with violence.
“The problem is we don’t know what they did with that, because they clearly didn’t cure or didn’t thwart it.
“But that fixation is another red flag. That’s another indicator of someone who’s escalating towards violence.
“Accompanying that is the behaviour of identification. He’d research all these people that carry out these violent attacks. That is a big red flag, particularly for a young man at his age.
Outlining one of the biggest changes he thinks needs to happen in the aftermath of the attack, Mr Grindell said: “The prime minister has talked about making some changes. I think one of the changes we need to do is move away from our obsession around ‘is somebody a terrorist?’
“Because you can be an incredibly violent individual, a grievance driven, violent individual without any ideology around terrorism.
“We have seen, and we need to learn from some of the awful occasions that have happened in the United States, where young men and women, particularly men, have gone on to conduct attacks at their schools.
“None of those people, or very few of them, are terrorists. They are driven by a deep sense of grievance, of isolation, of exclusion, real or perceived and I would suggest that this, in this case, may be his, his driving factor.
“It’s important to recognise that doesn’t excuse what he’s done. It may well be that they identify some, some very serious and significant mental health issues with him, which means that he may never be safe to be released.