Norwegian teenager responsible of travelling to UK to hold out contract killing | Organised crime

A Norwegian teenager has been discovered responsible of travelling to England to hold out a killing ordered by a global crime gang linked to Iran.

Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, from Stavanger, Norway, agreed to shoot an unknown individual for €25,000 (£21,500) in March final 12 months. Two days after he arrived within the UK armed police arrested him in a lodge room in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, seizing two weapons and ammunition.

After deliberating for 17 hours and 6 minutes, a jury on the Old Bailey discovered him responsible of conspiracy to homicide following a retrial.

Natland blinked however didn’t visibly react to the decision. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb remanded him into custody to be sentenced in October.

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

Natland instructed jurors he agreed at first to the homicide plot in trade for cash to pay for medication, pondering it was only a “joke” or “scam”.

Once he realised he was in a “pickle” with the Foxtrot Network, Natland mentioned he deliberate to “shoot himself in the foot” to keep away from finishing up the assassination.

The potential sufferer of the foiled homicide plot has by no means been recognized. The Metropolitan police mentioned 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 lodge room door, Natland emerged from his room smiling, solely sporting his boxer shorts, and mimed taking pictures one of many officers together with his empty fingers.

In a search of his room, officers discovered a plastic bag underneath his mattress containing a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and 19 rounds of ammunition.

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

Natland instructed jurors these statements had been “bravado” and he was secretly “terrified”.

“I wasn’t an international assassin,” he mentioned. “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 influence his girlfriend to not give proof throughout his cellphone calls from jail.

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The prosecutor Alistair Richardson mentioned: “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 courtroom heard that Natland, a gifted younger footballer, started taking medication aged 13. He spent a brief time frame in a care house, the place he first met a teenage member of the Foxtrot Network and was handed on to a recruiter often known as “Generalen”.

On 17 March 2025, Natland took a flight from Stavanger to Manchester airport on a short lived passport. He was stopped by Border Force officers in Manchester, who bailed him to return to the airport and catch the subsequent direct flight house.

Instead, he took a taxi to Huddersfield, the place he picked up £2,000 in money, two weapons and bullets, in addition to a stolen Nissan with a pretend quantity plate. He was arrested the next day at 5.15am.

Natland was managed by an English-speaking boss known as “Agent 47” – an obvious reference to the Hitman sport and film sequence – whose identification and whereabouts stay unknown.

Despite a number of high-ranking arrests in recent times, Foxtrot remains to be the dominant gang in Sweden and considered accountable for almost all of gang violence within the nation together with mass shootings and murders throughout the nation.

But with lots of the gang’s key figures now believed to be fugitive overseas – together with the chief, Rawa Majid, often known as the Kurdish Fox, who remains to be at giant and believed to be in Iran – the police operation to search out them is world. Last 12 months as much as 30 of the needed Swedes who had been arrested outdoors Sweden had connections to Foxtrot, in line with police.

In June, Poya Shafie, described as the one who deliberate Foxtrot’s murders and who was one of many males closest to Majid, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Swedish courtroom after being arrested in Iraq.