Teen accused of stabbing 3 girls at Taylor Swift-themed dance class, also Made Poison & Had a Terror Manual, police say

The teenager accused of stabbing three girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in England has been charged with producing the deadly poison ricin and also faces a terrorist offense for possessing a jihadi training manual, police said Tuesday.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, who is accused of murdering three girls and stabbing 10 other people on July 29, produced ricin which was found in a search of his home, Merseyside Police said. Police also found a computer file of an al Qaeda training manual titled: “Military Studies in Jihad Against Tyrants.”

Ricin comes from the castor oil plant and is one of the deadliest toxins in the world. It has no known vaccine or antidote and kills cells by preventing them from making proteins.

Rudakubana was charged in August in connection with the stabbings in the Southport community, which police said Tuesday had not been classified as a “terrorist incident” because a motive was not yet known. Police issued the new charges of producing poison and possessing a terrorist manual on Tuesday.

The stabbing happened in the first week of summer vacation as about two dozen young girls danced to Swift's music at Hart Space, a community center that hosts everything from pregnancy workshops to women's camps.

Witnesses described hearing screams and seeing children covered in blood running from the studio, which was located behind a row of houses on a residential street.

Joel Verite, a window cleaner on his lunch break, told Sky News at the time that he was walking past when he saw a woman slumped in blood on top of a car who screamed: “He's killing kids over there.”

Verite saw bloody children in the woman's car and ran in the direction she pointed, entering the studio and was startled to lock eyes with the suspect wearing a hooded jumpsuit and wielding a knife at the top of the stairs.

“All I saw was a knife and I thought, 'There's more people in there,'” Verite said. “But I was scared for myself and I wanted to help people. So I went outside and I was screaming because I knew where he was.”

Police said the first officers to arrive were shocked to find so many victims.

Rudakubana was charged with three counts of murder over the deaths of Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, in the seaside town of Southport in northwest England.

He has also been charged with 10 counts of attempted murder for the eight children and two adults who were seriously injured. Leanne Lucas, who led the class, and John Hayes, who worked at a nearby business and ran to help, were credited by police with trying to protect the children.

The stabbings have fueled far-right activists to fuel anger at immigrants and Muslims after social media falsely identified the suspect — then unnamed — as an asylum seeker who had recently arrived in Britain by boat.

Within hours of a community vigil to mourn the Southport victims, an unruly mob attacked a mosque near the dance studio and hurled bricks and beer bottles at officers and set fire to a police van.

The riots spread across England and Northern Ireland it lasted a week. More than 1,200 people have been arrested over the unrest and hundreds have been jailed.

Rudakubana was born in Wales to Rwandan parents, police later said. British media reported that he was raised a Christian.

He is expected to appear via video link on Wednesday at Westminster Magistrates' Court. His trial on murder charges was tentatively scheduled for January.

Dr. Renu Bindra of the UK Health Safety Agency said on Tuesday that “there was no evidence that victims, responders or members of the public were exposed to ricin either as part of the incident or afterwards”, and the risk to the public was low . No ricin was found at the scene of the stabbing.

The United States Chemical Warfare Service began studying ricin as a weapon during World War I. During World War II, Britain developed, but never used, a ricin bomb.

Ricin is estimated to be 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and can be fatal when inhaled, ingested, injected or swallowed. Two millionths of an ounce—about the weight of a grain of salt—is enough to kill an adult.

Several people have gone on trial around the world in recent years accused of attempting to use ricin in assassinations or terrorist plots, but examples of its successful lethal use are rare.

Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was killed in London in 1978 when a pinhead-sized lump of ricin was injected into his thigh – reportedly from a rigged umbrella.