A Norwegian teenager has been jailed for 20 years after travelling to Britain to carry out an assassination for an organised crime group linked to Iran, the Old Bailey heard.
Johannes Natland was 18 when he flew from Stavanger to the UK in return for a promised £21,000 payment. He was arrested in a Huddersfield hotel room hours before the planned killing and was later convicted of conspiracy to murder.
Firearms officers detained Natland at the Briar Court Hotel at 5.15am on March 19 last year. He was found with a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver, 12 rounds of ammunition and £2,000 in cash.
He had come to the door in his boxer shorts with his hands raised, before pretending to hold and fire a weapon at one of the officers.
Sentencing him at Woolwich Crown Court, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: “At the heart of this case is a stark fact. You agreed to assassinate another human being, a stranger to you, in a foreign country.”
She said the fact that nobody had been shot or physically harmed was important, but added that police intervention had prevented the plan from proceeding and that Natland would have carried out what he had agreed to do.
Norwegian teenager jailed for assassination plot
The court heard that Natland had been drawn into the plot after receiving a Signal message about a “murder in England” from a user calling themselves “Unknown Hustler”. He was then added to a group chat involving a Norwegian recruiter and Ali Shehab, a 22-year-old Swedish-Iraqi gangster known as “Agent 47”.
Shehab was described as a senior recruiter for the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish organised crime group which the court heard had been used by the Iranian regime. The UK sanctioned Foxtrot last April over its alleged involvement in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe.
Natland travelled from Stavanger to Manchester on March 17. He was questioned by Border Force officials and initially refused entry, but was told to return to the airport for a flight home four days later. He instead left the airport and took a taxi to a Manchester hotel.
The following day, recruiters directed him to woodland in Huddersfield, where he collected the guns and ammunition. After checking into a nearby hotel, he messaged his girlfriend: “In the bag is bang.”
At 10.39pm, a friend asked him, “U dun it?” Natland replied: “No. tomorrow.”
He admitted possessing the firearms but denied conspiring to murder. Giving evidence, he said he had been terrified and intended to sabotage the operation by shooting himself in the foot at the last moment.
Prosecutors argued that account was a lie and said he had boasted to friends about the mission. The court also heard that he told his then-girlfriend, Sara Solbi: “It will be a bit cool to really kill someone.”
The intended target has never been identified. Prosecutors said Natland “neither knew, nor cared” who he was supposed to kill.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said Natland had been a good student from a financially secure and supportive professional family, with every prospect of a successful life. She said his adolescence had been seriously disrupted by cannabis and then Class A drugs.
His mother, journalist Ellen Kongsnes, has previously said she did not believe he would have gone through with the killing, saying: “He could never harm anyone, he wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said Natland had clearly been tasked by someone in the Foxtrot Network, but added that no evidence had been found of a direct link to Iran in this specific case.
She said foreign states seeking to harm the UK increasingly used criminal proxies, recruiting people online with promises of significant financial rewards. Those carrying out the tasks, she added, were treated as “disposable assets” by the people directing them.
