More than nine hundred suspected extremists feared to be plotting school massacres or mass casualty attacks have been identified in the last four years, Home Office figures reveal.
Records show 475 individuals feared to be capable of committing a ‘school massacre’ were referred to the Government’s Prevent programme between 2021 and 2024, averaging about 160 per year.
And in the 12-month period to March this year, there were 469 referrals of individuals who were deemed to pose a threat of a ‘mass casualty attack’, which is the newly adopted definition.
This huge increase in one year has been put down to spikes in referrals after the Southport attack by Axel Rudakubana, who murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. The hard-hitting Netflix drama Adolescence is also thought to have increased referrals.
The shocking figures, recently released by Security Minister Dan Jarvis in a written Parliamentary answer, were of individuals usually referred to Prevent by their teachers, social workers or friends and family. Most of the cases were assessed and dropped, as the individuals appeared to pose no danger.
But 201 out of the 944 were adopted as cases for local authority safeguarding groups and assigned to a Prevent mentor for deradicalisation. None was linked to a single Islamist or Far Right mindset. But in some cases, police suddenly discovered the suspects were about to launch an attack, leading to their arrest and charge.
The Prevent referral of a Nazi-loving 15-year-old from Market Drayton, Shropshire – who cannot be named for legal reasons – led to his arrest. Police found the teenager bought a hoard of weapons including a cross bow, butterfly knife, stun gun and baton to ‘shoot up’ his school. He pleaded guilty to possessing the weapons and was jailed for 18 months in August.
But no action was taken on Rudakubana, 19, who was referred to Prevent at least three times, including once in 2021. No intervention was ordered because he was not judged to be an extremist.
This huge increase in one year has been put down to spikes in referrals after the Southport attack by Axel Rudakubana
He went on to murder Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in July last year. He was jailed this year to spend at least 52 years behind bars.
The Home Office data shows that most of the Prevent referrals for mass casualty and school massacres come through secondary school teachers.
Some experts say school teachers tend to be ‘over-zealous’ in their referrals.
But Ghaffar Hussain, a former Prevent manager in London, said: ‘There are some cases of teachers referring pupils out of safety. But also, as there is no strategy to deal with pupils obsessing with school massacres or violence, so everything is getting shoved into Prevent.’
In the year ending March this year, a total of 8,778 individuals were referred to Prevent – a 26 per cent increase on the 6,922 referrals in the previous 12-months. The largest group in this year’s referrals were those whose ideology could not be identified, at 3,009, or 34 per cent of the total. This group was followed by Far-Right referrals, after which were the Islamist ones.