Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was banned from returning to his former school a week before he stabbed three young girls to death in July last year, the BBC understands.
Rudakubana's father begged a taxi driver not to take him to Range High School, from which he was expelled on July 22 five years earlier.
He was wearing the same hooded sweatshirt and surgical mask as during the attack a week later.
Rudakubana was referred to the government's Prevent counter-terrorism program three times between 2019 and 2021 due to his general obsession with violence.
On Monday, the 18-year-old admitted to stabbing three young girls to death during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July.
He also pleaded guilty to a series of charges, including the attempted murder of eight children and two adults, producing a biological poison, ricin, and possessing an Al-Qaeda training manual – a terror crime.
Despite this, his case was never treated as terror-related by police, as he did not appear to follow an ideology, such as Islamism or racial hatred, and instead seemed to be motivated by an interest in extreme violence.
The Interior Minister has launched a public inquiry into the attacks to “find out the truth about what happened and what needs to change.”
Yvette Cooper said “independent answers” were needed about Prevent and other agencies that came into contact with Rudakubana.
A week before the attack, Rudakubana booked a taxi under the name Simon to Range High School on the last day of the school year, but his father ran out of the house to intervene.
On July 29, he left his home before ordering a taxi under the same name to take him to the dance class where he committed the murders.
After he admitted his crimes, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) described him as a “young man with a sickening and persistent interest in death and violence” and said he had shown no signs of remorse.
Rudakubana was described as having a volatile temper, having anger problems and being prone to violence.
He attended Range High School in Formby, where he developed problems with violence in Year 9.
Fellow students remember that he had an obsession with despotic figures, including Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. He is also known to have accessed information about the IRA.
Rudakubana was expelled from school in October 2019 at the age of 13, after which he returned to the school in December 2019 with a hockey stick and attacked a student, breaking his wrist. He had to be held back by a teacher.
After this he attended The Acorns School, which provides specialist education for those with additional needs, and was subsequently enrolled at Presfield High School & Specialist College.
He attended sixth form there for only a few days and was largely dealt with by home visits. The school sometimes asked the police to be present when they visited.
Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership said Rudakubana “struggled to reintegrate into school” following his exclusion from Range High.
Lancashire Constabulary also responded to five calls from his home address, between October 2019 and May 2022, regarding concerns about his behaviour.
Last August it was revealed that he had a “diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder” and had been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for some time.”
Rudakubana called Childline several times as a young teenager and eventually told the agency he was going to take a knife to school because of racist bullying.
This was one of the incidents that led to his expulsion from Range High School.
The NSPCC said Rudakubana's last call to Childline was “sufficiently serious to exceed a threshold”, prompting Childline to inform local authorities of its concerns in 2019.
An NSPCC spokesperson said the attack was a tragedy and said it was “vital” that any review following the trial “investigates all circumstances and reasons that contributed to this terrible attack” to ensure that similar tragedies do not occur can be stopped in the future.
Rudakubana was born in Cardiff in 2006 to Rwandan parents and moved to the Southport area in 2013.
He took acting classes at the Pauline Quirk Academy and in 2018 appeared in a promotional video for BBC Children in Need, which has since said it has no ties to him.
The BBC removed the video from its websites following the Southport attack.
Neighbors on the street where he and his family lived in Banks, West Lancashire, about 6 miles from Southport, have told the BBC that police visited the house several times in the months leading up to the Southport attack.
Minutes before leaving to travel to dance class, Rudakubana is said to have searched social media platform X for the 2024 Sydney church attack in which Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and five others were stabbed.
Rudakubana's internet browsing history on a laptop was deleted shortly before he left.
A doorbell camera caught him pacing outside his family home before taking a taxi to the dance studio where he was to carry out the stabbings.
Bebe King, age six, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, age nine, were all killed.
Police would find another knife and the deadly poison ricin in his home, as well as documents on Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide, the wars in Chechnya and Somalia, punishments on slave plantations and remote-controlled car bombs on Rudakubana's devices. .
A PDF file of an Al-Qaeda training manual was also found.
Images relating to the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Korea, as well as images of knives and machetes, have also been found on tablets.
Not guilty pleas were initially entered against Rudakubana after he refused to speak at a hearing, but these were converted to guilty pleas on Monday, the first day of his trial.
He will be sentenced on Thursday and is expected to receive a life sentence.
However, he cannot be sentenced to life imprisonment for his crimes because he was 17 when he committed the crimes.
