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A Norwegian teenager has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of travelling to the UK to carry out an assassination.
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Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, is said to have agreed to undertake a contract killing in exchange for €25,000.
He was arrested at a hotel in northern England in March 2025 after having arrived at Manchester airport two days earlier, with officers discovering a bag containing a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver, and 19 bullets under his bed.
Analysis of his phone and communications showed he had been instructed on how to collect the weapons and that he had received social media messages when he was in Norway asking him to carry out a shooting in the UK, the Metropolitan Police said. He had been controlled by someone called “Agent 47” – an apparent reference to the Hitman video game series.
It is not known who the intended target was.
Natland claimed that he had not intended to follow through with the shooting.
“You agreed to be the enforcer and pursued it, despite numerous opportunities to extricate yourself,” Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said at the sentencing hearing at Woolwich Crown Court, per the Associated Press. “Although the fact that no one was shot dead or physically harmed is important, I am sure had the intervention of the police not prevented the plan from proceeding, you would have done what you had agreed to.”
UK Counter Terrorism Policing said Natland had been operating under orders from someone in the Foxtrot Network, an international criminal gang based in Sweden that authorities say is involved arms trafficking and that has been linked to shootings and contract killings in Northern Europe.
The US State Department says the Iranian regime has leveraged the Foxtrot Network to carry out attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe. Both the US and UK have sanctioned the group and its leader, Rawa Majid.
Helen Flanagan, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said: “Natland was arrested just hours before he was due to carry out an assassination here in the UK.”
“The intended target of this specific assassination has never been identified, and we found no evidence of any direct link to Iran in this case. However, as recent events have shown, CTP will seek to proactively disrupt any attempts by hostile states to carry out criminal acts in the UK,” she added.
