Norwegian teen guilty of traveling to UK for Iranian-linked gang contract killing

A nineteen-year-old Norwegian pizza restaurant worker arrived at Manchester Airport on a temporary passport in mid-March last year with a straightforward assignment: travel to England, find an unknown person, and shoot them dead. For this work, he would be paid twenty-five thousand euros. Two days later, armed police burst into his hotel room in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and found him sitting on the bed in his boxer shorts. Under the mattress lay a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver, and nineteen rounds of ammunition. This week, after a jury deliberated for seventeen hours and six minutes, Johannes Kongsnes Natland was found guilty of conspiracy to murder.

Natland had been recruited by the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish organized crime group with documented links to the Iranian government. The network operates across Europe with ruthless efficiency, and it had identified him as useful—young, desperate, and malleable. He had first encountered one of their members in a care home years earlier, after a childhood marked by drug use beginning at age thirteen. A recruiter known as "Generalen" had brought him into the fold. By the time Natland agreed to the killing, he was being controlled by an English-speaking handler who called himself "Agent 47," a reference to the video game assassin. That handler's identity and location remain unknown.

Natland told the court at the Old Bailey that he had initially thought the whole thing was a joke or a scam—that he had agreed to it mainly because he needed money for drugs. Once he realized the Foxtrot Network was serious, he claimed, he had panicked. He said he planned to shoot himself in the foot to get out of the commitment. But the evidence painted a different picture. In a text to his girlfriend, he had written: "I'm going on crazy mission. It will be a bit cool to kill someone. If I don't get caught we have to celebrate." A friend testified that Natland had bragged he was "going to get a lot of money and somebody is going to die." When police arrived at his hotel room door, he emerged smiling and mimed shooting at one of the officers with his empty hands.

The prosecution argued that Natland was not the confused teenager he claimed to be, but rather a troubled and dangerous young man who had made a calculated choice. The evidence supported this reading. After his arrest, he had lied to police. From prison, he had tried to persuade his girlfriend not to testify against him. The jury found him guilty. Justice Cheema-Grubb remanded him into custody pending sentencing in October. Natland blinked at the verdict but showed no other reaction.

The identity of the intended victim has never been disclosed. The Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism unit said they had uncovered substantial evidence that Natland fully understood what he was being asked to do. The plot was foiled before it could be carried out, and a life was saved—though neither the public nor the victim themselves may ever know how close they came to death.

The Foxtrot Network remains the dominant criminal organization in Sweden, responsible for the majority of gang violence in the country, including mass shootings and murders. Despite numerous high-ranking arrests in recent years, the group continues to operate. Its leader, Rawa Majid, known as the Kurdish Fox, remains at large and is believed to be in Iran. Many of the gang's key figures have fled abroad. Last year, up to thirty wanted members with Foxtrot connections were arrested outside Sweden. In June, Poya Shafie, described as the architect of the network's murders and one of Majid's closest associates, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Swedish court after being captured in Iraq. The international manhunt for the organization's remaining operatives continues, with police operations spanning multiple countries and continents.