Why has Southport not been declared a terror attack?
Axel Rudakubana, the alleged Southport killer, has been accused of possessing a terrorist document, yet the police still insist there is no evidence of a terrorist motive. How can both be the case?
The document Rudakubana is accused of downloading is a version of the 180-page ‘al-Qaeda training manual’. It is also known as the ‘Manchester manual’ after it was found for the first time by police on a computer in a flat in Cheetham Hill, Manchester in May 2000, more than a year before 9/11.
Scotland Yard arrested a man called Abu Anas al-Libi, who rented the flat, as part of an investigation with the FBI into the 1998 al-Qaeda truck bomb attacks on US embassies in East Africa that killed more than 200 people. Libi, real name Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqaii, had moved to the UK several years earlier. He was released 48 hours later and managed to evade a surveillance team sent to follow him, escaping abroad shortly afterwards.
Al-Libi was not re-captured until October 2013 when he was tracked down in Tripoli after the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He was sent to New York but died of liver disease while in custody in January 2015 and never
The al-Qaeda training manual, originally written in Arabic, had been translated into English by the FBI and released by the US Department of Justice as part of evidence used in the embassy bombings trial in New York in 2001. At one stage it was freely available online.
The manual offers advice on urban warfare along with instructions to operatives on how to establish cells and what to say if they are arrested. Much of it is taken up with what makes the ideal al-Qaeda recruit and the structure of the organisation.
An academic analysis of the manual, which quotes it at length, was published by the US Air Force counterproliferation center in 2004. It was written by Professor Jerrold Post, a former CIA officer who was then director of the political psychology program at George Washington University. The academic analysis, which is the document Rudakubana is alleged to have had in his possession, is at the lower end of terrorist charges. It is still available online through the US Air Force air education and training command university.
Documents available on the internet can still be illegal to possess if they provide instructions ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. What Rudakubana’s position on the manual is, and whether the content is useful for terrorists will be the subject of any trial, if it is to take place.
As far as the law goes, there is no requirement that an individual should be a terrorist in order to possess a terrorist document, just that they have no ‘reasonable excuse’ for having it. In order for an offence, such as murder, to be considered a terrorist attack, it needs to have a ‘political, religious, racial or ideological cause’. To prove terrorist intent, prosecutors use ‘mindset’ evidence – often material found on a defendant’s electronic devices – to demonstrate that there is an ideology behind the attack. There is currently no suggestion this material exists in Rudakubana’s case.
Mass killers, such as high school shooters, can develop murderous intent for a variety of reasons, personal and psychological, that often have nothing to do with ideology. What those reasons may be in the case of the Southport attack remain to be seen.
From The Spectator October 30, 2024