Norwegian teenager guilty of travelling to UK to carry out contract killing

Johannes Kongsnes Natland was recruited to murder unknown person by international crime gang linked to Iran

A Norwegian teenager has been found guilty of travelling to England to carry out a killing ordered by an international crime gang linked to Iran.

Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, from Stavanger, Norway, agreed to shoot an unknown person for €25,000 (£21,500) in March last year. Two days after he arrived in the UK armed police arrested him in a hotel room in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire , seizing two guns and ammunition.

After deliberating for 17 hours and six minutes, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty of conspiracy to murder following a retrial.

Natland blinked but did not visibly react to the verdict. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb remanded him into custody to be sentenced in October.

Natland, who worked part-time in a pizza restaurant, was recruited by the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish organised crime group with links to the Iranian government.

Natland told jurors he agreed at first to the murder plot in exchange for money to pay for drugs, thinking it was just a “joke” or “scam”.

Once he realised he was in a “pickle” with the Foxtrot Network, Natland said he planned to “shoot himself in the foot” to avoid carrying out the assassination.

The potential victim of the foiled murder plot has never been identified. The Metropolitan police said their counter-terrorism officers “uncovered a significant amount of evidence demonstrating that Natland was fully aware he was being asked to kill someone in the UK”.

“I’m going on crazy mission,” Natland had texted his girlfriend. “It will be a bit cool to kill someone. If I don’t get caught we have to celebrate.”

When armed police banged on his hotel room door, Natland emerged from his room smiling, only wearing his boxer shorts, and mimed shooting one of the officers with his empty hands.

In a search of his room, officers found a plastic bag under his bed containing a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and 19 rounds of ammunition.

At his trial, one of Natland’s friends recalled a conversation where the defendant bragged he was “going to get a lot of money and somebody is going to die”.

Natland told jurors these statements were “bravado” and he was secretly “terrified”.

“I wasn’t an international assassin,” he said. “I thought people had this impression and expected me to be this guy. I knew I wasn’t.”

But jurors heard Natland lied after his arrest and had tried to persuade his girlfriend not to give evidence during his phone calls from prison.

The prosecutor Alistair Richardson said: “The reality is the defendant is a troubled but dangerous young man. A young man who agreed to kill in a foreign country for money.”

The court heard that Natland, a talented young footballer, began taking drugs aged 13. He spent a short period of time in a care home, where he first met a teenage member of the Foxtrot Network and was passed on to a recruiter known as “Generalen”.

On 17 March 2025, Natland took a flight from Stavanger to Manchester airport on a temporary passport. He was stopped by Border Force officials in Manchester, who bailed him to return to the airport and catch the next direct flight home.

Instead, he took a taxi to Huddersfield , where he picked up £2,000 in cash, two guns and bullets, as well as a stolen Nissan with a fake number plate. He was arrested the following day at 5.15am.

Natland was controlled by an English-speaking boss called “Agent 47” – an apparent reference to the Hitman game and movie series – whose identity and whereabouts remain unknown.

Despite several high-ranking arrests in recent years, Foxtrot is still the dominant gang in Sweden and thought to be responsible for the majority of gang violence in the country including mass shootings and murders across the country.

But with many of the gang’s key figures now believed to be fugitive abroad – including the leader, Rawa Majid, known as the Kurdish Fox, who is still at large and believed to be in Iran – the police operation to find them is global. Last year up to 30 of the wanted Swedes who were arrested outside Sweden had connections to Foxtrot, according to police.

In June, Poya Shafie, described as the person who planned Foxtrot’s murders and who was one of the men closest to Majid, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Swedish court after being arrested in Iraq.