The rise of Britain’s ‘Axelcels’: Why are ‘good younger lads’ idolising Southport monster Axel Rudakubana and planning killing sprees?

McKenzie Morgan grew up kicking a football outside his family bungalow on a neat and tidy leafy street in South Wales.

Neighbours in the village of Llanfrechfa said he was a ‘lovely’ lad from a nice family, who never caused trouble or kept them up with house parties.

They could barely believe it when police barged into the family home in June last year and were gobsmacked to hear what was really happening behind closed doors.

Morgan, aged 17 at the time of his arrest, had been planning a terror attack on an Oasis concert after idolising Southport monster Axel Rudakubana.

His mother had become so scared of his behaviour and declining mental health that she had even hidden away all the knives in their home.

Concerned friends reported him to authorities after he boasted about making ricin – the same dangerous toxin made by Rudakubana – and told of his ‘motivation’ to bomb the concert in Cardiff.

He had also researched local dance schools to target, a chilling echo of Rudakubana’s attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

Morgan claimed to police that he had only downloaded a terror manual and told friends of plans for an attack because he was ‘bored’ and ‘intended to shock’ people.

Family sources told the Daily Mail the teen had fallen down a ‘wormhole’ and was radicalised through warped social media posts.

But while his loved ones were horrified that the quiet boy they thought they knew could be capable of planning something so evil, experts have warned Morgan is not alone and in fact, Britain has a serious ‘nice young lad’ problem.

Just last month, another teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was spared jail after carrying out a reconnaissance mission in Southport and scoping out potential targets for an attack.

He openly expressed his admiration for Rudakubana, calling him ‘the goat’ – a reference to the phrase ‘greatest of all time’.

Officers also found notes he had written about his ‘love’ for Rudakubana, including references to incels and ‘Axelcels’, and it was found he had sent a TikTok message declaring ’77 days until Axel 2′.

Head of Counter Terrorism Policing, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor has sounded the alarm on the concerning pattern.

Asked whether he was worried about the recent spate of copycat cases, Mr Taylor said: ‘Very much so.

‘We’ve had a couple actually where we’ve found material on devices that suggests they are aspiring to be like the Southport attacker.’

To Mr Taylor, the answer lies in dangerous social media algorithms and AI.

He told of how the ‘inspiring’ material young people are being exposed to online has become a ‘real risk’.

‘It’s challenging because it is extremism that falls outside of Terrorism Act legislation,’ Mr Taylor explained.

‘In the sort of bracket of what I describe is ‘lawful, but awful’ – horrible things that people are seeing online.

‘We need to get much, much better at having that stuff removed.’

On the added danger of AI, he said: ‘It is clearly having an impact.

‘Social media platforms may have a different view on where their responsibilities lie. But we know that AI will turbocharge propaganda. It can assist in building cyber attacks.

‘We’re seeing chatbots who support inspiring different ideologies. So it is a threat.’

In Morgan’s case, he had gone as far as attempting to buy a 15cm knife online, and made a series of Google searches on how to burn people’s faces and ‘stab people properly’.

In one Snapchat message to a friend, he sent a picture of the knife advertised on Amazon and asked the question: ‘Would this work?’

After finding a knife hidden in his bedroom, Morgan’s own mother was so worried by his behaviour that she reported him to child mental health services.

Aged 18 at the time of sentencing earlier this year, he was handed a 14-month sentence at the Old Bailey. 

A family source claimed Morgan was ‘extremely vulnerable’ due to his autism – which Rudakubana had also been diagnosed with – and found himself in a ‘dark place’.

They said he had been watching sick videos on social media apps such as TikTok and YouTube – something which officers in the case had also warned is becoming a growing challenge among teenagers.

Speaking after the case, detective superintendent Andrew Williams, of Counter Terrorism Policing Wales, raised a similar alarm.

‘Mr Morgan was not born bad,’ he said outside court. ‘He didn’t come into the world wanting to be a terrorist or aspiring to one day kill people, let alone children.

‘As a teenager himself when he committed the offence, he was vulnerable to the malign influences that prey on our young people in today’s online world.

‘The fact that he was heavily influenced by the perpetrator of one of the most horrific attacks this country has seen in recent times, is a terrifying indictment of the abhorrent commentary, hateful opinion and violent imagery that too many of our young people are exposed to via the myriad of online sites, chat forums and gaming and social media platforms.’

Neighbours on the quaint street in Llanfrechfa, near Cwmbran, where the teen lived with his family in a large, detached bungalow, also said he had always been a ‘quiet’ and ‘nice young lad’, but felt he had been radicalised online.

They remembered Morgan and his family had moved to the leafy street, where houses average around £290,000, when he was still a young boy, but said they hardly saw him out of the house once he’d grown up.

One neighbour said: ‘He was just a nice young lad who has obviously been radicalised by something.

‘I feel as bad for him as I do for what was going on really. With the internet the way it is nowadays it’s just a breeding ground for that stuff.

‘So I feel as bad for his parents as I do for what he was planning to do really.

‘Whether there would have been follow through with that, who knows, but they obviously stopped it at the right time.’

Another neighbour told the Mail: ‘He was a little boy when they came here.

‘I know he who would kick the ball against the neighbour’s wall, but that’s just kids.

‘So we can remember him as a small child, but I can’t say we remember him as a teenager.

‘He kept himself to himself. We would never see him around or anything.’

When the Mail approached his family at his address, they refused to speak.

Morgan claimed to police that he had only said what he had to friends because he wanted to ‘shock’ but had no intention of carrying out such attacks.

He was charged only with possession of a terrorist document after prosecutors concluded he did not have any ideological motive and could not be charged with preparing a terrorist attack.

It was also said his searches and messages regarding plans for an attack did not amount to a ‘credible’ plot.

He told friends on Snapchat that he had tried to make ricin, just as Rudakubana had, and planned to bomb the Oasis music concert at Principality Stadium.

His Snapchat account was a misspelled version of Rudakubana’s name and a search of his phone showed he had researched the killer, saving images of him with words that mocked the victims.

In messages sent on the app between April 7 and June 2 last year, he had praised Rudakubana and shared images of the killer, saying he wanted to engage in a ‘terrorist-style’ attack like him.

On April 17 he had attempted to purchase the 15cm kitchen knife on Amazon and on April 19 sent a screenshot of the weapon to another Snapchat user asking: ‘Would this work?’

On April 26, he searched online for Cory Park playground and the Dance Star Academy near his home and, two days later, created a note on his phone titled ‘Places to attack’.

The note included a screenshot of the dance school identified on a map. He had been close by to the dance school just days earlier, location data on his phone revealed.

It was heard during the court case that Morgan had experienced suicidal thoughts and had been ‘unhappy’ due to bullying at school.

One psychiatrist suggested to the Daily Mail that it could have been a perfect storm of factors – mental health, loneliness and bullying – that made him more prone to being radicalised online.

‘We found in studies that mental illness was a risk factor for radicalisation. It was dysphoria, depression, a sense of feeling that the world was awful and you had no place,’ Dr Edgar Jones, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, said.

‘And so we hypothesised that people were seeking an answer to their problems, a sense of purpose and belonging, that they perhaps become isolated, had lost hope, couldn’t see a positive future, and a radical message or radicaliser could come in and offer them a quick fix.

‘And if you are doing something very similar to someone else, you’re kind of joining a select brotherhood, a pretty gruesome one and an unpleasant one.

‘But it may be that it does fulfill some sense of wanting to be part of a particular, well known, shocking group.

‘It may also be a strange desire for status, recognition, standing, in a warped sort of way. And, of course, a lot of anger.’

A commonality between Rudakubana, Morgan and another copycat plotter, a 17-year-old boy from Merseyside, is that they were all diagnosed with autism.

Dr Jones said: ‘It’s definitely been suggested that there are some features of autism which could be risk factors for radicalisation.

‘So for example, having social relationship difficulties. Perhaps you become isolated, you may have a restricted range of interests, so that you would focus on a particular topic.

‘And if that became frustrating, you know, you could develop anger.

‘So there are characteristics of autism, which people have tied to being vulnerable to a particular message, a radical narrative message.’

Last month, the 17-year-old from Merseyside, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.

He had planned to attack a Taylor-Swift themed event wearing a green hoodie, just like Rudakubana.

The white teenager, who appeared with a shaven head and dressed in all black at Liverpool Crown Court, had declared himself to be the ‘number one Axelcel’ and wrote notes calling Rudakubana the ‘black version of me’.

It was heard that the teenager, aged just 16 at the time of the offence, had visited Southport, 15 miles away from him, and taken pictures of the area.

He even used ChatGPT to produce poetry in honour of Rudakubana, and in the encrypted notes section of his phone had references to incels, spurgcels – incels with Asperger’s Syndrome – and ‘Axelcels’.

He stated on May 30 last year on TikTok that ‘Axel Rudakubana is the goat’, adding: ‘He’s alive and well unlike those three kids. When Axel Rudakubana did what he did, I never felt more heard, listened to and inspired in my life.

‘I will forever commemorate him for his activities.’ 

Like Rudakubana, who he hailed a ‘hero’, he had dropped out of school and is thought to have autism.

It was heard he had researched possible targets for an attack on the anniversary of the horrific Southport attack, and admitted to officers that he had been to the location of a Taylor Swift event he had scoped for an attack.

In a chilling message on TikTok, he had told a contact: ’77 days until Axel 2,’ adding ‘hopefully more than three’ – a reference to the number of young girls murdered by Rudakubana.

On August 6, he told a contact via TikTok: ‘Spergcel failure I am f***ed right now dude. 

‘I’m locked in the house with knives and family is coming. I’m gonna have to ‘Prosper’ – a reference to Nicholas Prosper who killed his mother, brother and sister in a shotgun attack in Luton in September 2024, before preparing to attack a primary school.

He went on to explain that he was in his ‘back garden with knives. I think it’s pretty symbolic – spergcels fail. If I can’t get to my mother I’m just calling the police and admitting to everything.’

He said that he would be going to ‘juvie’ prison – a reference to juvenile detention – and finished the conversation by declaring: ‘Hail Nicholas Prosper, hail Axel Rudakubana.’

He had alerted authorities himself when he called 999 from the bathroom of his grandparents’ house in August last year.

He told officers he was ‘captivated’ by the idea of violence and wanted to copy Rudakubana.

‘There wasn’t any events near me so I’ve postponed it,’ he told police.

When officers rushed to the house they found a bag containing knives he had taken from the kitchen of his grandparents’ house.

He was convicted only for terror offences relating to possessing an Al-Qaeda training manual and a recipe for ricin.

The court heard he had further researched school shootings and misogynist incels.

However, like Morgan, he was not charged with preparing terrorist attacks because attacks on schoolchildren and misogynistic attacks are not considered ‘ideological’ offences.

In another copycat case, Joe Metcalfe was just 15 when he stole his father’s Lexus car and embarked on a scouting trip to a mosque in Keighley, West Yorkshire, before crashing it into a fence.

Leeds Crown Court heard in 2023 that Metcalfe filmed himself on his phone during the journey and had Serbian folk music playing in the background, in a deliberate recreation of the Christchurch mosque attacks.

A judge said at the time that Brenton Tarrant, the man behind the 2019 attacks in New Zealand, was a ‘hero’ to Metcalfe, who was ‘extremely interested in Right-wing ideology and Right-wing terrorists’.

The court heard, however, that Metcalfe had since converted to Islam.

The teenager was jailed for 10 years with an additional licence period of six years after being found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism.

Preparations for his terror attack included compiling a manifesto, making contact with a gun seller and writing out a detailed plan.

Jurors in Metcalfe’s trial were shown a pictogram drawn by him in a notebook manifesto which shows a stick man surrounded by a swastika and an SS symbol as well as the names of some of the most notorious killers of recent years.

Nick Price, head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, said at the time: ‘Although he spent time watching and sharing violent, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic videos, these were not idle fantasies.

‘He made a detailed plan to murder Muslims at a nearby mosque while disguised as an armed police officer, record the killings and escape.

‘He stole his father’s car to carry out a reconnaissance mission, contacted a gun seller to try and secretly ship a weapon to the UK and but for apprehension intended to carry out the attack.’