LONDON — A 19-year-old from Norway who travelled to England to carry out a contract killing for the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish crime group backed by Iran’s government, was sentenced Friday to 20 years’ detention, BBC News and The Guardian reported.
Johannes Natland was arrested at the Briar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in March 2025 with two working handguns and live ammunition, two days after flying into Manchester on an emergency passport. A jury at his retrial found him guilty of conspiracy to murder; he had admitted possessing the firearms.
He had been offered 270,000 Norwegian kroner, about £21,000, to shoot a target who has never been identified. “We haven’t been able to establish exactly who the intended victim was,” said Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London. Police moved after Norwegian officers arrested the teenager who recruited him and found messages about the plot, the BBC said.
“You agreed to assassinate another human being, a stranger to you, in a foreign country,” Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told him at Woolwich Crown Court. Natland had told jurors he planned to shoot himself in the foot to escape the “pickle” he was in, The Guardian reported.
The Foxtrot Network has been sanctioned by both Britain and the United States over its links to Tehran. Europol has described its use of hired teenagers as “violence-as-a-service.”
Sources: BBC News, The Guardian
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