British teen Axel Rudakubana, who was convicted of murdering three young girls in a knife rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport in summer 2024, has been charged with new assault and weapons offenses. File photo courtesy Merseyside Police
July 31 (UPI) — The British teen serving a 52-year sentence for the Southport killings of three young girls was charged Friday with additional crimes allegedly committed while in prison, including aggravated assault and weapons offenses.
Axel Rudakubana, 19, is accused of assaulting emergency workers in two separate attacks, one count of aggravated assault and possession of an offensive weapon between May and late October 2025
Police said all the alleged incidents took place at HMP Belmarsh in London.
Rudakubana is scheduled to go before Westminster Magistrates’ Court on September 11 to answer the charges.
He will appear via video-link from Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric facility west of London to which he was transferred from prison last week.
Officials determined he was too dangerous for a regular penal institution following an independent clinical assessment, but the Justice Ministry stressed that would be returned to prison to complete his sentence once his mental state had improved and he was assessed as well enough to do so.
A psych evaluation after he carried out the July 2024 knife rampage that killed Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, and seriously injured eight other children and two adults, found him fit to stand trial.
Following a trial in January 2025, Rudakubana was sentenced to a record 52 years in prison, minus time spent on remand.
The judge was unable to impose a so-called whole-life sentence normally applied for crimes of this seriousness, where the offender remains in prison until they die, as Rudakubana was 17 at the time of the attack.
He will become eligible for parole in 2076, just shy of his 70th birthday, but is unlikely to ever be released from prison.
The initial phase of an official inquiry into the killings concluded in April that Rudakubana could have been stopped but for the “catastrophic” and “irresponsible” failures of authorities and his parents.
Former Appeal Court judge Sir Adrian Fulford, said the attack woud likely have been prevented if Rudakubana’s parents had reported what they knew and law enforcement, child and mental health agencies responded appropriately to the risk he was known to present.