A 19-year-old Norwegian man was convicted Wednesday of traveling to England to carry out a contract killing on behalf of the Foxtrot Network, a Sweden-based crime gang that Europol has described as a pioneer of recruiting teenage killers for what it calls “violence-as-a-service.”
Johannes Kongsnes Natland, a part-time pizza restaurant worker from Stavanger, was found guilty of conspiracy to murder after a two-week trial at the Old Bailey in London. He had already admitted to possessing firearms.
Police arrested Natland in a hotel room in Huddersfield in March last year, hours before he was due to carry out the hit. Officers found him with two working guns, 19 rounds of live ammunition, and £2,000 in cash. When he saw officers at the door, he mimed shooting one of them before being restrained and handcuffed.
Natland had agreed to kill an unknown person for €25,000 (about £21,000), having previously sent his girlfriend messages saying it “will be cool” to “finally kill someone.” On March 15 last year, he messaged her: “I’m going on a crazy mission.” Two days later, he told his mother he was going to play football and flew to Manchester instead.
The teenager came from a middle-class home in Stavanger, a city enriched by North Sea oil. Jurors at the Old Bailey heard that Natland, while not quite “a hitman from a Hollywood movie,” was precisely the type of vulnerable teenager preyed upon by the network.
The son of two journalists, Natland began taking drugs at 13. By last year he was taking them “pretty much every day,” he told the court. After a psychiatric episode involving drug-induced psychosis, he dropped out of school and spent time in a home for problem children, where he encountered a teenager with the username UnknownHustler, who later recruited him to the gang.
On March 15, UnknownHustler forwarded him a Foxtrot solicitation. The tender read:
“Killing in England 270k. Have transport ready out of the country. Will smuggle assassin out of the country. The police will be paid to look the other way. Nothing can go wrong.”
The figure of 270,000 Norwegian kroner amounts to about £21,000. Natland was added to a group chat called Assassin EU, alongside users named Generalen and Agent 47. His first message in the group was “Who is to be killed?” He was arrested before learning the answer.
Iran-linked leadership
The Foxtrot Network emerged in Sweden at the end of the 2010s and is led by Rawa Majid, 39, a Swedish-Iraqi national known as “the Kurdish Fox.” Majid has been sanctioned by the UK for his role in attacks across Europe carried out on behalf of the Iranian regime and is understood to live under the protection of the Islamic Republic. The gang is believed to have been behind an attempted attack on the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm in January 2024, when an object thought to be an explosive device was found outside the building.
Child enforcers and the Samurai Kids
Foxtrot recruits through Telegram, Signal, Instagram, and Snapchat. Its largest group, called the Samurai Kids, had between 10,000 and 11,000 members before Telegram shut it down. Senior members, called “instigators,” order and finance crimes. Below them are two tiers of “recruiters,” often aged 15 to 18, who post adverts and handle responses. At the bottom are “enforcers,” some as young as 13, who carry out the attacks. A legal loophole across Scandinavia exempts children under 15 from criminal responsibility, making minors the gang’s preferred foot soldiers.
Grenades and shootings in Norway
The network’s reach has spread into Norway. On September 23, 2025, multiple grenades exploded outside a nail salon in Bislett, Oslo, shattering windows and peppering walls with shrapnel. Police linked two 13-year-old boys to the attack and suspect they were recruited via TikTok, supplied with smuggled grenades, and paid 30,000 NOK (about £2,000) to carry it out. Within weeks, three boys aged 12, 13, and 14 were linked to a shooting in Sarpsborg, and a 15-year-old was suspected of throwing a grenade at a restaurant in Strømmen.
Foxtrot is one of roughly 70 Swedish gangs now operating in Norway, where teenagers are hired anonymously through encrypted messaging apps for between £20,000 and £60,000 per hit.
Deaths inside Sweden
Inside Sweden, the violence has cost multiple lives. In September 2023, an explosion in a residential street north of Uppsala killed Soha Saad, 24, a newly qualified teacher who lived with her parents. She was one of 12 people killed in gangland violence that month. In the same 12-hour period, an 18-year-old rapper was shot dead at a sports ground in Fruängen, southern Stockholm, and one man was killed and another wounded in a separate shooting in Jordbro.
Swedish prosecutors have responded by seeking prison sentences rather than youth detention for teenage suspects. Three teenagers were convicted after a man was shot dead at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March 2024. The 17-year-old believed to have fired the fatal shot was sentenced to eight years in prison, a 19-year-old accomplice received a life sentence, and their 16-year-old co-defendant was placed in closed care.
