Norwegian Teen Gets 20 Years for UK Murder Plot Tied to Iran-Linked Gang

A London court sentenced a Norwegian teenager to 20 years in detention on Friday, October 16, for a murder plot he agreed to carry out in Britain for a Swedish crime gang with alleged links to Iran.

Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, was sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court by Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb. He will spend at least 13 years in custody. A jury convicted him of conspiracy to murder in July, after a retrial. The target was never identified, and Natland had not been told who he was meant to shoot.

Recruited while playing games online

Natland grew up in Stavanger, Norway. He played youth football and worked part time in a pizza restaurant. Prosecutors said recruiters from the Foxtrot Network reached him while he was playing games online. The network is a Swedish organised crime group. Britain and the United States have sanctioned the group and its leader, Rawa Majid, and both governments allege that it has carried out attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe on behalf of Iran. Iran has denied that allegation.

The court heard that a 17-year-old handler, known as Generalen, hired Natland on behalf of the network, and that an English-speaking controller who called himself Agent 47 directed him. The agreed fee was 25,000 euros. Natland had just turned 18 when he answered an advert that offered money for a killing and promised that nothing could go wrong.

Arrested in a Huddersfield hotel

Natland flew from Norway to Manchester airport in March 2025. Armed police arrested him two days later at a hotel in Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire. Officers found a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and ammunition in his room.

He admitted holding the guns and the ammunition. He denied conspiracy to murder and said he had not meant to go through with the plan. He told the court he had thought about shooting himself in the foot as a way out. Prosecutors rejected that account. They pointed to messages in which he told a friend that killing someone would be cool, and they described him as a willing recruit. The judge said she was sure he would have carried out the murder if police had not stopped him, and she described his conduct as purposeful and persistent, not a brief impulse.

A warning about hired proxies

Commander Helen Flanagan, who leads Counter Terrorism Policing in London, said there was no evidence of a direct link to Iran in Natland's own case. She said the case should warn young people who get offers of easy money online. The people running these schemes, she said, will not protect the recruits when police catch them.

Natland's Norwegian lawyer, Farid Bouras, said the priority now was to bring his client home, and that he would work to secure a transfer to Norway as fast as possible. A Norwegian court convicted the teenage handler last year and gave him 14 years in custody. Norwegian police have charged three more people in the same network of cases, and prosecutors there have yet to decide whether to bring them to trial.

British prosecutors say Natland is one of a growing number of young men tried after foreign states or crime groups hired them online for violence. No one was shot in this plot. The sentence still ranks among the longest given to a teenager in Britain for a hired killing that never took place.