Days after his 18th birthday, Johannes Natland travelled alone from his home country, Norway, to the UK. The purpose of his visit was not, as he told the Border Force officers who interviewed him at Manchester Airport, to visit friends he had met through online gaming.
It was to carry out an assassination on the streets of Britain on behalf of the Foxtrot network. This powerful Swedish crime group acts as a proxy for the Iranian state and has become a growing concern for the UK Government.
Natland is just one of several teenagers the group has hired to commit murder and violent attacks on its targets, mainly in Sweden and Norway.
Following a pattern seen in other Foxtrot cases, Natland was recruited by a boy he had met in a children’s care home and made an easy target by his mental health issues and addiction to drugs from the age of 13.
Natland, now 19, denied conspiracy to murder and claimed he was planning to shoot himself in the foot instead of going through with his mission, but was convicted on Wednesday. The teenager had previously admitted charges of possessing two handguns and ammunition, and will be sentenced later this year.
Over the two days after his arrival in Britain on 17 March 2025, Natland was directed by anonymous handlers to pick up the stolen car, handguns and ammunition to be used in the crime.
The murder was prevented by a tip-off by Norwegian police, who alerted their British counterparts in time for them to find Natland armed and ready to complete his mission in a hotel in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He was awaiting the location and details of the person he was to kill.
The UK Government sanctioned Foxtrot in April 2025 for its involvement in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe, but because Natland was never given the details of his target, it is not known whether the planned assassination related to the group’s drug trafficking enterprises or tasking from Iran.
It is the first publicly disclosed case linked to the Foxtrot network in Britain, but when announcing last year’s sanctions, the Foreign Office pointed to dozens of “Iran-backed plots, presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents”.
The warning comes amid a growing trend of paid proxies of the Iranian state carrying out violence and intimidation on the streets of Britain, often targeting political dissidents and the Jewish community.
The US Treasury said that Foxtrot was part of Iran’s wider use of criminal proxies to “maintain plausible deniability for its external operations”, and that its leader had been coordinating with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
As well as numerous contract killings, assaults, and other forms of violence in Scandinavia, Foxtrot orchestrated an attempted hand grenade attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm in January 2024.
The ‘General’
Natland’s instructions were coming from a figure who called himself the “General” on the Signal messaging app and was in direct contact with Foxtrot leaders in Iraq. The General was himself just 16 at the time, and had already commissioned at least two fatal shootings by teenagers in Sweden.
Messages presented to Natland’s trial at the Old Bailey showed that the boy and his boss, who went by the name Agent 47, cared little for the age of their footsoldiers.
When discussing who to recruit for the mission Natland would later be selected for, the General asked whether someone aged 16 would work. Agent 47 confirmed it would, while ordering: “Get a new guy. Quickly. People are waiting for us.”
Natland obtained an emergency passport allowing him to leave Norway and boarded a flight from Stavanger to Manchester (Photo: Met Police)And so on 15 March 2025, Natland received a message from a boy he had met in a children’s care facility in his hometown of Stavanger. “Jappning [murder] in England,” it read, offering 270,000 Norwegian krone (£21,000) along with organised transport and a promise that “nothing can go wrong”.Within 10 minutes of receiving the offer, Natland had indicated his interest, and over the course of that evening he began discussing flights and logistics.
By the end of the following day, he had obtained an emergency passport allowing him to leave Norway, and on 17 March he boarded a flight from Stavanger to Manchester with a small amount of clothing, £40 in cash and the phone through which he would receive his instructions.
A close call
The mode of Natland’s arrival immediately raised the suspicions of Border Force officers, who detained him for interview at Manchester Airport and were wary of his vague account of visiting gamer friends with a one-way ticket with no hotel reservation.
Border Force formally refused Natland entry to the UK, but could not book him on a flight home until 21 March and released the teenager on bail under “removal directions”.
Agent 47 then directed him to get a taxi to a hotel where he collected an envelope of cash and onwards to a second hotel that would be his base for the mission.
Natland was stopped by Border Force but released on bail because there was no return flight to Stavanger (Photo: Met Police)An unidentified affiliate of the Foxtrot network who was based in England and went by the codename “1”, took over the instructions on 18 March and led Natland to a Huddersfield housing estate, where a plastic bag containing two handguns and ammunition was hidden at the base of a tree and a stolen car was left parked for his use.
Messages indicated the assassination was to take place the following day, with Agent 47 telling Natland: “We have much to do tomorrow.”
But at 5.15am on 19 March, armed police burst into Natland’s room at the Briar Court Hotel and arrested him.
‘The European mission’
Unknown to the teenager, a cascade of events in Norway had led police to the “General” and to the discovery of the UK mission just in time.
John Ivan Johansen, a police prosecutor from Norway’s Kripos agency, told The i Paper how the case began unravelling six days earlier, when a 14-year-old boy walked into a police station in Stavanger and told police Swedish criminals had tried to hire him to stab the son of a local police chief.
The person behind the plot was the “General”, and when investigators seized his phone they discovered he was at the same time recruiting for a “European mission”.
“We were obviously surprised because we had thought this Stavanger case was just a local thing,” Johansen said.
Investigators could find no further clues on what the “European mission” was until one of Natland’s friends told a teacher that he had boasted of becoming an assassin for the Foxtrot network and the school alerted police on 18 March.
Natland filmed himself handling one of the handguns he collected (Photo: Met Police)After interviewing Natland’s friend, Norwegian police traced the teenager’s phone and, to their shock, found that he was in Huddersfield.
“The Stavanger police sent a message to Interpol in Manchester and warned them about Natland – that he was in the UK, probably on a mission to shoot somebody,” Johansen said.
Teenage assassins
For Johansen and his colleagues, the Natland case is the continuation of a disturbing trend with the Foxtrot network.
“Almost every time, the perpetrators are young vulnerable children that have problems with drugs or are in child protection,” he said. “There are cases from Sweden where they are younger than 15.”
The youth and inexperience of such recruits has made them difficult for authorities to detect or predict. In Stockholm, another 18-year-old recruited by the General shot the wrong person dead in February last year.
Swedish court documents obtained by The i Paper show the teenager asked ChatGPT questions including “If I kill someone, how do I avoid getting caught by the police?” before shooting an innocent passerby multiple times in the head.
Johansen said that, in addition to contacting children through existing friendship networks, Foxtrot posts advertisements in social media groups offering money for missions.
“They see the adverts and then they can connect with people directly, and they start to lure them in with promises of protection and money,” he added. “Vulnerable kids who may not have a family start to feel important.”
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