When police officers ambushed Johannes Kongsnes Natland in a hotel room in West Yorkshire in March last year, the teenager was found with two working guns, 19 rounds of live ammunition and £2,000 in cash.

When he saw officers at his door, he mimed shooting one of them before he was thrust against the wall and handcuffed. 

On Wednesday, the 19-year-old Norwegian, who worked part-time at a pizza restaurant, was found guilty of travelling to England to carry out a killing ordered by an international crime gang.

The teen from Stavanger, who had agreed to shoot an unknown person for €25,000 (£21,000), had previously sent messages to his girlfriend saying it 'will be cool' to 'finally kill someone'.

The hit man was recruited by the Foxtrot Network, a Sweden-based gang infamous for pioneering the relatively new phenomenon of hiring teenage killers that Europol has called 'violence-as-a-service' (VaaS).

But the shadowy gang has spread across the border to Norway with its sphere of influence already felt on the streets of Britain. 

The Iran-linked gang has been terrorising Stockholm for years, recruiting children as young as 13 on social media to carry out acts of arson, murder and bombings.

The group is led by Swedish-Iraqi national Rawa Majid, 39, known as 'the Kurdish Fox', who rules the Scandinavian drug trade.

On March 15 last year, Natland sent a message to his girlfriend in a fit of excitement which said: 'I'm going on a crazy mission.'

Two days later, he left home in Stavanger, south-west Norway, telling his mother he was going to play football.

Instead, he flew to Manchester to assassinate a target on behalf of Foxtrot for a payment of £21,000. 

He was arrested in a hotel room in Huddersfield hours before he was due to carry out the hit.

It seemed implausible. The baby-faced teenager came from a middle-class home in a safe town enriched by North Sea oil. He was a bright student, talented footballer and aspiring lawyer.

But in a two-week trial at the Old Bailey, jurors heard how Natland – while not quite 'a hitman from a Hollywood movie' – was precisely the type of vulnerable teenager preyed upon by Europe's most menacing gang.

Foxtrot began by using the Telegram app and moved on to Signal and other popular social media apps including Instagram and Snapchat. 

The largest group, which has since been closed by Telegram, was the Samurai Kids and had 10,000 to 11,000 members but there are also smaller groups with a few hundred participants.

At the top of the group are the 'instigators', who order the crime and finance it, and below them are two tiers of 'recruiters', the lower level of which are often young men aged between 15 and 18.

Their job is to post adverts, deal with the replies and, when someone takes up the offer, hand them on to a senior gang member.

At the bottom are 'enforcers' who actually carry out the job and have included children as young as 13.

While the criminal syndicate originated in Sweden, it is now expanding across the border and wreaking havoc in Norway where teenagers – mostly from a migrant background – are hired as would-be assassins.

Because of a legal loophole in Scandinavia, children under the age of 15 cannot be held criminally responsible – making minors the ideal recruits for carrying out attacks on behalf of the Foxtrot crime ring.

It emerged in Sweden at the end of the 2010s and is led by Mr Majid, who has been sanctioned by the UK for his role in attacks across Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime.

Mr Majid, as head of the expanding criminal network, is understood to live under the protection of the Islamic Republic and has been involved in violent plots, particularly against Jewish and Israeli targets.

The group is believed to have been behind the attempted attack against the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm in January 2024, when an object believed to be an explosive device was found outside it.

On September 23, 2025, at 8.45pm, multiple grenades exploded outside a nail salon in Bislett, Oslo, shattering the windows and riddling its walls with shrapnel.

Police linked two 13-year-old boys to the attack and suspect that they were recruited via TikTok, supplied with the smuggled grenades, and paid 30,000 NOK (£2,000) to carry out the deed.

The Bislett explosion was only the beginning. Within weeks, two more Foxtrot-linked attacks followed.

On September 30, three boys aged 12, 13 and 14 were linked to a shooting incident in Sarpsborg. A week later, a 15-year-old was suspected of throwing a grenade at a sushi restaurant in Strømmen.

In a disturbing episode in February 2023, a teenager armed with an AK-47 fired 15 bullets into the home of a terrified mother and her young child in a Stockholm suburb.

In footage obtained by the Daily Mail at the time, bullets were sprayed into the front door with empty cartridge cases bouncing down the stairwell, before the camera focused on the front door riddled with holes.

A frightened mother, who lived in the block, told the Daily Mail: 'It was crazy. It wasn't a small gun. It was a Kalashnikov.

'It is terrible that attacks like this are normalised.'

Local media reports indicated that police suspected the attack was linked to a desperate turf war between two gang leaders: 'The Kurdish Fox' and 'The Greek'. 

In September that year, a loud explosion ripped through a quiet residential street of new-build family homes just north of the Swedish city of Uppsala.

Soha Saad, 24, was killed in the blast. She lived with her parents, and had recently qualified as a teacher. 

In footage of the aftermath, her mother can be heard screaming for her daughter, cursing the nation to which they once fled. 

Ms Saad was one of three victims of gangland violence in a violent 12-hour spell, and one of 12 people to be killed in a month.

In the same 12 hours, an 18-year-old rapper was shot dead at the Mälarhöjden sports ground in Fruängen in southern Stockholm in a brazen attack during a football training session, and hours later one man was killed and another was wounded in a shooting in Jordbro, south of the capital.

Gangs have been increasingly seeking out young girls and children with mental disabilities to carry out the killings, as they believe they are less likely to be suspected by their target.

Confronted by the increased involvement of young people in violent gang crime, prosecutors are increasingly seeking imprisonment rather than 'closed care' for child suspects, according to Swedish media.

Three teenagers were sentenced after a man was murdered while eating dinner at a restaurant south of Stockholm in March 2024, with the 17-year-old who is believed to have fired the fatal shot handed a jail term rather than youth detention.

The teenager, who is understood to have used an automatic weapon, was given eight years while a 19-year-old man was given life in prison and their 16-year-old accomplice put in closed care.

In July last year, a 34-year-old Swedish man was charged with threatening two employees at the police central detention centre in Grønland, Oslo.

He reportedly threatened to place a bomb at the home of one of the employees' family members.

According to NRK, he claimed that he was part of the criminal Foxtrot network.

But Foxtrot is but one of around 70 Swedish gangs operating in Norway, where teenagers are being anonymously hired on encrypted messaging apps.

They can be paid anywhere between £20,000 and £60,000 for a hit, using hand grenades or improvised explosives smuggled into the country.

Many don't even know who commissioned the crime, but are willing to carry it out for the right payment. 

Despite being sanctioned, the Foxtrot criminal network seems only to be growing globally – with the incident in Huddersfield in March last year showing that British soil is not immune.

The son of two journalists, Natland started taking drugs aged 13.

He told the Old Bailey that by last year he was taking drugs 'pretty much every day'.

He subsequently dropped out of school after ending up in a psychiatric unit with drug-induced psychosis, convinced his parents were about to kill him.

He said he then spent a short period in a 'home for problem children' where he encountered one of those who later recruited him to the Foxtrot Network, a teenager with the username UnknownHustler.

On March 15, the user forwarded him a message, which was in effect a Foxtrot online tender for business, known by police as VaaS.

The Foxtrot tender was stark: '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.)

The teen was then added to a group with a 17-year-old teenager, who went by the name of 'Generalen', or General, and another called Agent 47. 

The group name was Assassin EU.

The first message he posted in the group was 'Who is to be killed?'

It is still not clear that he ever got the answer to that question right up to the moment he was arrested, with police thwarting the attack.