European police battle cross-border 'violence-as-a-service' gang
The conviction of a Norwegian teenager in London has exposed a borderless outsourcing model that merges drug turf wars with Iranian state interests, threatening public safety and draining law enforcement resources across 11 European nations.
A London jury convicted 18-year-old Norwegian Johannes Natland on Wednesday of conspiracy to murder, revealing how a Swedish organised crime group outsourced a planned killing in West Yorkshire to a vulnerable teenager.
The Foxtrot Network has weaponised social media to recruit minors through gamified instructions, creating a scalable "violence-as-a-service" model. By outsourcing killings to teenagers who are rarely paid because they are quickly apprehended, the network minimises its operational costs and legal exposure while maximising disruption in European cities.
Since 2022, the group is believed responsible for about 35 murders and several attacks on Israeli targets in Europe. Europol's taskforce, OTF GRIMM, now includes 11 nations stretching from Iceland to Spain, reflecting how rapidly the model has spread beyond its Scandinavian origins.
The threat to European public life is compounded by the network's links to Tehran. Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid fled to Iran in late 2023 and struck a deal to operate freely in exchange for targeting the Iranian regime's enemies. "The regime is ordering the leader of the Foxtrot Network to instigate his network to commit attacks against the Iranian regime's enemies," said Diamant Salihu, an investigative journalist for Swedish broadcaster SVT.
The Natland case illustrates this borderless logistics chain. A 16-year-old operating under the handle Generalen recruited Natland for 270,000 Norwegian kroner. The plot was then managed by a Foxtrot member using the alias Agent 47, who booked Natland's flight to Manchester, secured an emergency passport, and guided him via the encrypted app Signal to hidden weapons and cash in Huddersfield.
Teenagers like Atilla Azimov, who killed the wrong man in a Stockholm suburb, are deliberately chosen because they do not consider the consequences. "They don't care at all if the teenagers get caught. Because when they get caught, they cannot ask for money that they have been offered," Salihu said.
European authorities have scored tactical victories, making over 280 arrests in 15 months. Key figures like Ali Shehad Ahmed, the suspected Agent 47, were detained in Iraq, while Mohamed "Moewgli" Mohdhi was arrested in Tunisia. However, the network's leader remains in Iran, and rival gangs like the Dalen Network are already copying the model, ensuring this low-cost, high-impact threat to European security will persist.
