Moment 'hitman' mimed shooting police during arrest
A teenager who travelled from Norway to the UK to carry out a "hit" for a Swedish organised crime group has been found guilty of conspiracy to murder.
An Old Bailey jury heard how Johannes Natland, 19, was arrested in a hotel room in Huddersfield with two working guns and 19 rounds of live ammunition in March 2025.
He pleaded guilty to possession of the firearms and ammunition but had denied the conspiracy charge.
Key Developments
Following a retrial, Natland showed no emotion as the jury brought in a unanimous guilty verdict after deliberating for just over 17 hours.
During the trial opening, prosecutor Alistair Richardson said the teen was "recruited" by the Foxtrot Network, which was described as a Swedish organised crime group backed by the Iranian regime.
Natland had claimed rather than carry out the attack, he had planned to shoot himself in the foot, telling jurors he had found himself in "a major pickle".
The court heard how the Foxtrot Network had been sanctioned by both the UK and the US for its close links to the Iranian government.
The group is infamous for pioneering the relatively new phenomenon of hiring teenage killers that Europol has called "violence-as-a-service" (VaaS).
Natland flew into Manchester Airport on an emergency passport on 17 March and was guided by videos on the messaging app Signal to Huddersfield, where the guns, a stolen car and a stash of cash were hidden.
Johannes Natland was found guilty of conspiracy to murder
He was only prevented from carrying out the hit because Norwegian police arrested the teenager who had recruited him, and found messages about the UK plot in the Signal app on his phone.
There was then a race against time to find Natland before he shot his unknown target in England.
The trial heard Natland was at the Briar Court Hotel with two handguns stashed under his bed when he was arrested by police.
When he saw officers at the door, he mimed shooting one of them before he was pushed against the wall and handcuffed.
The teenager who recruited him is 17, so cannot be named for legal reasons, but was known by his online username "Generalen", or General.
Johannes Natland at Manchester Airport after being allowed to enter despite Border Force officers' suspicions
Generalen was convicted of his involvement in the conspiracy in Norway in May this year, as well as of several other attempted murders and arsons he had arranged on behalf of the Foxtrot Network.
He was also convicted for his part in two murders in Sweden.
Ahmed Zamzam was killed at Lund Central Station on 28 January last year, and Murad Abdelkader was killed in the Stockholm suburb of Alby less than a month later.
Generalen told his trial that Abdelkader was not the intended target.
He had overseen the murder, telling the gunman Atilla Azimov to shoot Abdelkader "five or six times in the back" and then in the face.
He described the operation as a success, apart from the fact that the wrong man was shot.
At his trial Generalen said his "mentor" in the Foxtrot Network was a man with the username "Agent 47".
Swedish police believe Agent 47 is Ali Shehab Ahmed, 22, who was arrested in Sulaymaniyah in Iraq in December and is awaiting extradition.
He has been described by Swedish police chiefs as a "key player" in the Foxtrot Network and "very close" to the group's leader Rawa Majid.
Natland grew up in the oil city of Stavanger in south-west Norway.
The son of two journalists, and a promising young footballer, he started taking drugs aged 13.
He told the Old Bailey that by last year he was taking drugs "pretty much every day".
He dropped out of school, and after becoming paranoid that his parents were trying to kill him, he ended up in a psychiatric unit with drug-induced psychosis.
He said he then spent a short period in a "home for problem children" where he met one of those who later recruited him to the Foxtrot Network, a teenager with the username UnknownHustler.
On 15 March 2025, UnknownHustler forwarded him a message, which was in effect a Foxtrot online tender for business, known by police as VaaS.
The Foxtrot tender was blunt - "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." (270,000 Norwegian Kroner is about £21,000.)
Natland was then added to a group with Generalen and Agent 47. The group name was Assassin EU.
The first message he posted in the group was "Who is to be killed?"
It is not clear that he ever got the answer to that question right up to the moment he was arrested with two guns under his hotel room bed.
The next day, 16 March, Agent 47 booked Natland's one-way air ticket to the UK.
On 17 March, just two days after he had been recruited, Natland flew from Stavanger to Manchester, using the emergency passport, as his normal one had expired.
On arrival at Manchester, he was detained and questioned, as UK Border Force officers were suspicious about his emergency passport, and his lack of money, hotel booking, or return air ticket.
They refused him entry, but let him enter temporarily anyway as the next flight back to Stavanger was not for three days. The contract hit was still on.
Johannes Natland at the Briar Court Hotel in Huddersfield
Agent 47, and a logistics man with the username "1", then told Natland to get a taxi to Huddersfield.
A series of messages guided him to a wad of cash hidden under some rubbish near the entrance to a footpath tunnel.
He checked into the Briar Court Hotel, paying in cash, and then took another taxi to some woodland at the end of Bradley Boulevard.
There he collected a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and some ammunition.
On returning to the hotel he could not resist sending friends videos of himself handling the guns and a picture of him on the hotel bed with the cash spread out behind him, though this was just the down payment.
"We have much to do tomorrow," Agent 47 messaged him.
A bit later Natland asked "How does it work with the money?"
"You will get it when the job is done," Agent 47 said. "In cash."
But by this time Generalen had been arrested by Norwegian police at Oslo airport.
