A teenager was hired by a 16-year-old hitman to kill in Britain. His target remains a mystery

Max StephensJuly 30, 2026 — 11:43amLondon: A Norwegian teenager hired for an assassination in the UK was recruited by a 16-year-old hitman, the London Telegraph has revealed.Johannes Kongsnes Natland, a 19-year-old aspiring footballer and the son of two broadsheet journalists, was promised €25,000 ($41,000) by the Iran-affiliated drugs gang Foxtrot to shoot a target in England.Johannes Kongsnes Natland was arrested at a hotel in Huddersfield in northern England last year. Met PoliceCounter-terror police arrested Natland at a three-star hotel in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, on March 19 last year before he could carry out his assignment.Officers found a pair of handguns, 18 rounds of ammunition, £2000 ($3830) in cash and three pairs of workman’s gloves in his room.Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid with second-in-command Ali Shehab Ahmed (right) who apparently directed the operation from Tehran.Police only stopped Natland in time because his recruiter, a Norwegian schoolboy with the online moniker “Generalen” (which means general in Norwegian), had been arrested three days earlier for arranging a hit on the son of a police chief in Stavanger, on Norway’s south-west coast.Detectives learnt from messages on the teenager’s phone that Natland had flown from Stavanger to Manchester and had been positioned to kill his target.It is not yet known whom Natland was ordered to assassinate.Foxtrot is Sweden’s most powerful and dangerous crime syndicate, with Rawa “Kurdish Fox” Majid, the gang’s leader, issuing his orders from Iran under Tehran’s protection.The group has been sanctioned by UK and US authorities for orchestrating attacks on Jewish people in Europe.The gang uses vulnerable teenagers to carry out killings on its behalf, a method police refer to as “violence as a service”.On the face of it, Natland – a middle-class teenager from a small Norwegian city – would not fit the bill. But after entering a care home for his drug use, he became an ideal candidate for recruitment.Norwegian and British detectives are working to determine whether Natland was hired to settle a drugs-related score or to assassinate someone for Foxtrot’s paymasters in Tehran, a source said.Three other underage defendants have also been charged in connection with this case, according to John Ivar Johansen, a prosecutor from Norway’s organised crime taskforce, Kripos.Natland was promised €25,000 for to carry out a hit on an unknown target in the UK.Metropolitan PoliceJohansen said the question of whom the gang had sought to kill was a matter for UK police and that Kripos had received no intelligence from the UK regarding the intended victim.Only hours before the killing was due to take place, Norwegian police sent an urgent warning to their counterparts in England, who scrambled a counter-terror response unit and detained Natland at the hotel.During his three-week trial at the Old Bailey in London, Natland attempted to convince jurors that he had travelled to the UK out of fear of reprisals from the gang if he objected.“I thought, ‘What are you going to do? Shoot yourself in the foot?’ I wasn’t going to kill anyone, especially not someone that I had never met,” he told the court and his parents, who attended every day of the trial.Natland’s parents had repeatedly begged for their son to be tried in Norway, citing Britain’s overcrowded prisons and the difficulties arising from his not understanding English.However, on Wednesday, Natland was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, having previously admitted two charges of unlawfully possessing guns and one of possession of ammunition.The jury at the Old Bailey deliberated for 17 hours and six minutes before finding him guilty.Natland, the eldest of three, is the son of two journalists from the city’s daily newspaper, the Stavanger Aftenblad, and grew up in a £723,000 four-bedroom detached house.Natland’s life spiralled after he began using drugs as a teenager.Met PoliceFrom the dock, Natland described his upbringing as boring, with little to occupy him apart from playing football for his local club seven days a week.Once a high-achieving student, he began “experimenting” with cannabis at the age of 13. He then graduated to more powerful drugs, including cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines. He regularly skipped school and found work in a pizza takeaway to help pay for his drug debts.Natland’s drug use became so acute that he started having psychotic episodes. On one occasion, he “lost his mind” and, armed with a kitchen knife, locked himself in his brother’s room because he thought his parents wanted to kill him.His family called the police and took Natland to a psychiatric unit.Natland’s behaviour proved too difficult for his parents to handle, and 10 days later, they arranged for him to be moved into a care home.There, he was easy pickings for the Foxtrot network.‘Want to come to England and shoot someone?’Natland befriended another teenage resident, and one day, was sent an online message from the gang asking whether there was “anyone who wants to come to England and shoot someone”.A police image shows Johannes Natland wearing gloves while handling a gun.Met PoliceNatland, who was later discharged from the psychiatric unit for taking drugs, took up the job advert.In a group chat on Snapchat with two of the gang’s members, named “Generalen” and “Agent 47”, he asked: “Who’s to be shot?”The pair oversaw Natland’s entire operation in the UK.Agent 47 booked Natland’s flight and gave detailed instructions on how to fool Border Force officers about his reasons for travelling and where to pick up the weapons.The man behind Agent 47 is believed to be Ali Shehab Ahmed, the 21-year-old second-in-command of the Foxtrot network and formerly one of Europe’s most wanted criminals.Ahmed was arrested in Iraq’s Kurdistan region last December and is accused by Swedish police of using teenagers for assassinations.The Telegraph can reveal that Generalen, who is now 17 years old, is serving a 14-year prison sentence in Norway for arranging two gangland executions in Sweden and the attempted murders in England and in Stavanger.Generalen grew up in Randaberg, a small hamlet nicknamed the “green village” for producing 80 per cent of Norway’s parsley supply.From a young age, he had an explosive temper and repeatedly picked fights with other pupils. He dreamt of a career in the police or the army.A police image of Natland during his arrest in Huddersfield last year.But by the time Generalen was 11, he was embroiled in low-level gang violence.In October 2022, then 13, he was placed into a children’s home by the Rogaland county board and lived there until his arrest three years later.At the age of 14, he had immersed himself in the world of organised crime and was determined to work his way up the Foxtrot hierarchy.Money was of no interest to him, only the approval of his gangland bosses.On January 28 last year, 30-year-old Ahmad Zamzam, a suspected member of the rival organised crime gang Rumba, was shot and killed at a railway station in Lund, Sweden.A month later, on February 24 in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, Murad Ahmed Abdelkader, a 20-year-old McDonald’s worker, was shot and killed while walking home from work in a case of mistaken identity.Both hits had been arranged by Generalen, who was only 15 years old at the time.After his 16th birthday, he undertook his final mission: the murder of the 14-year-old son of a Stavanger police chief.On March 13 last year, four days before the hit in the UK, he recruited two teenage hitmen, then aged 15 and 17, to stab the boy “deep in the stomach”.The attack was foiled only when the 15-year-old panicked and confessed the plot to the police before it could take place.Officers arrested the 17-year-old assassin who had been waiting with a large knife outside the house for the target’s return from school.Generalen himself was arrested three days later. He was sentenced on June 1 to 14 years’ imprisonment with a minimum term of nine years.Natland will be sentenced at a later date.From our partners