A shadowy network hiring baby-faced assassins to carry out hit jobs across Europe should be of the greatest concern to our security forces, an expert has said.
Norwegian Johannes Natland, 19, was last week found guilty of conspiring to murder an unknown target in the UK after he was recruited online to be a teenage assassin by the Iranian-linked Foxtrot international crime syndicate.
It comes after Scandi child hoodlums have wreaked carnage in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Now, an attack on British soil has been foiled and security expert Professor Anthony Glees believes it will sound alarm bells throughout all Western nations.
He said: “It is to be seen as part of a concerted wider and deeper attack on our Island home by hostile states and violent criminal organisations, malign actors both, who want to do us great harm. If we let them.”
Days after his 18th birthday, Natland travelled alone to the UK, telling Border Force officers at Manchester Airport he was here to visit friends he had met through online gaming. But he was here carry out an assassination in Britain on behalf of the Foxtrot network.
This Swedish crime group acts as a proxy for Iran. His way into the murky network follows a pattern seen in other Foxtrot cases – an east target due to his mental health issues and heavy drug addiction, he was recruited by a boy he had met in a children’s care home.
For two days last March, anonymous handlers directed Natland to pick up the stolen car, handguns and ammunition to be used in the murder. It was only stopped by a tip-off from Norwegian police and armed British police arrested him in a Huddersfield hotel room.
Under the bed inside the room, they found a 9mm semi-automatic Luger pistol, a revolver, 12 rounds of live ammunition and £2,000 in cash. He was awaiting the location and details of the person he was to kill, but luckily police got there in time.
Natland is one of hundreds of teens recruited across Scandinavia to maim and kill for ultra-violent criminal cartels like Foxtrot, which was sanctioned last April by the UK Government for its involvement in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe.
Prof Glees told us: “Natland’s arrest and trial provides us with chapter and verse detail about the dangers we now face from these evil groups.They want to destroy our way of life, whether to prevent us from supporting brave Ukraine, or screw us for our hard earned cash.
“Whether they do this by assassinating politicians, or by sabotage, cyber crime or by simply undermining our faith in law and order and in the ability of the security forces to keep us safe so sapping our morale.
“The key thing to understand that we are already at war with this motley crew of thugs but seem unwilling to accept we need now to be on the highest levels of readiness, in a sense on a war footing especially where civil defence and resilience are concerned.”
Prof Glees highlights comments made in 2024 by the director general of MI5 Sir Ken McCallum in which he warned we were under threat from state actors, intent on doing us harm.
He highlighted Russia, in particular, as being on a mission to generate sustained mayhem on British and European streets using thuggish tactics like arson, sabotage and violence, to target people, businesses and disrupt our way of life.
The professor added: “Two years on, we’re seeing how right he was. We think of numerous acts of sabotage and violence in the past year.
“There was the brazen attack on RAF Brize Norton (the largest RAF station in the UK), the firebombing of two properties and a Honda all owned at some point by Keir Starmer as well as the attacks on our defence industry, warehouses holding equipment for Ukraine.
“This is the context into which cocky Natland fits, acting out his fantasy even as he was being arrested in his black boxers. He told his girlfriend ‘Now I can finally kill someone and it’s perfect, as I get money to do it. I can kill someone and life will be wonderful’.
“Sadly this Norwegian is not one of a kind. We are told by Dame Sara Khan that 29 per cent of young Brits aged 18 to 34 believe violence is acceptable and that 15 per cent of these are highly dangerous ‘violence fixated’ individuals.
“Here we glimpse the foul cesspit into which malign actors fish, often via Telegram or the Dark Web, offering £21,000 for a ‘wet job’ – which is what murders are called in that world – and rather less (£2,000-£3,000) for firebombing.
“We must learn carefully from what his case tells us. Yes, MI5 had the right intelligence, presumably from an agent inside the Swedish ‘Foxtrot’ group who recruited him.
“But we can see, too, that most of the agents now recruited and deployed by malign actors are themselves not political. They have no direct or over connection to those for whom they work.
“This makes them much harder for MI5 to detect, of course, and that some of them will be idiots does not make it better.”