U.K. May Change Terrorism Law After Southport Attack, Starmer Says

Britain faces a new and dangerous form of extremism, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday, warning that loners and misfits were being radicalized by “a tidal wave of violence freely available online.”

In a speech at Downing Street, Mr. Starmer said that unlike the terrorist threat posed by organized groups like Al Qaeda, where a clear ideology could be identified, some young people were becoming fixated on extreme violence for its own sake. He compared the brutal murder of three girls at a dance class last July in Southport, England, to some of the school shootings seen in America.

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana, 18, admitted to murdering three girls in the coastal town of Southport and to attempting to kill 10 other people. The attack last summer prompted rioting in several towns and cities across England and in Northern Ireland.

Serena Kennedy, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, the force that covers Southport, said in a statement on Monday that Mr. Rudakubana had “an unhealthy obsession with extreme violence,” as evidenced by a trove of documents, images, videos and texts about violence, conflict and genocide that he had viewed on his digital devices.

“We know that he had researched numerous documents online which show that obsession,” she said, adding: “From all those documents, no one ideology was uncovered, and that is why this was not treated as terrorism.”