A 19-year-old Norwegian man has been found guilty of conspiracy to murder at the Old Bailey in London, after a retrial jury deliberated for 17 hours and 6 minutes. Johannes Kongsnes Natland, from Stavanger, was convicted of agreeing to shoot an unidentified person in the United Kingdom in exchange for €25,000 (£21,500) (The Guardian).

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb presided over the case and remanded Natland into custody. Sentencing is scheduled for October 2026.

The conviction follows a procedural journey through the British courts. The first jury was unable to reach a verdict, resulting in a hung jury — meaning the jury could not agree, and the court ordered a retrial (BBC). The second jury returned a guilty verdict after more than 17 hours of deliberation.

Natland was 18 years old at the time of his arrest on March 19, 2025 (BBC). He had flown from Stavanger to Manchester Airport on March 17, 2025, travelling on a temporary passport. Border Force officials stopped him at the airport and bailed him to return and catch the next direct flight home. Instead, Natland took a taxi to Huddersfield in West Yorkshire (The Guardian).

In Huddersfield, Natland picked up £2,000 in cash, two firearms, and ammunition. Armed police arrested him in his hotel room two days after his arrival in the UK. Officers seized a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver, and 19 rounds of ammunition. (BBC reporting from earlier in the proceedings cited 12 rounds of live ammunition seized, while The Guardian's most recent reporting gives the figure as 19 (BBC; The Guardian).) During his arrest, Natland mimed shooting at police officers (BBC).

The Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism command led the investigation. Officers uncovered evidence showing Natland was fully aware he had been asked to kill someone in the UK. The potential victim of the foiled plot has never been identified.

Natland's own communications reinforced the prosecution's case. He texted his girlfriend before the planned attack: "I'm going on crazy mission" and "It will be a bit cool to kill someone. If I don't get caught we have to celebrate." During his evidence at trial, Natland told the court he "got into a pickle" over the assassination plot (BBC). At the time of the offence, he was working part-time in a pizza restaurant.

Prosecutor Alistair Richardson described Natland as "a troubled but dangerous young man" who agreed to kill in a foreign country for money (The Guardian).

The most geopolitically significant element of the case is Natland's link to the recruitment chain. According to The Guardian's reporting, Natland was recruited by the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish organised crime group with links to the Iranian government (The Guardian). The Foxtrot Network is one of Sweden's most prominent criminal organisations, and its reported connections to Tehran place this case within a broader pattern of state-aligned criminal actors being used for targeted violence on European soil.

The broader context here is the documented escalation of Iranian-linked assassination and intimidation plots across Europe over the past several years. European security services have tracked a growing number of cases in which Iranian state actors have outsourced violent operations to organised crime groups, using intermediaries to maintain plausible deniability — the ability to deny involvement because no direct link to the state can be proven. The Natland case fits this template with unusual clarity: a teenage recruit with no apparent prior terrorist credentials, dispatched from Scandinavia to the English north, armed and funded through local criminal infrastructure, and directed at an unidentified target.

The use of a teenager as the operative is itself notable. It lowers the profile of the attacker and may complicate intelligence detection, though it also introduces operational risk, as evidenced by Natland's interception at Manchester Airport and his inability to maintain operational discipline, including texting his girlfriend about the mission. The Border Force stop did not result in detention, however; Natland was bailed and simply took a taxi to his contact, exposing a gap between initial suspicion and the Prevent-level intervention that might have prevented him from reaching Huddersfield.

That counter-terrorism command, rather than a conventional murder investigation team, led the case signals how UK authorities categorised the threat. The involvement of the Met's CT apparatus indicates the plot was treated as terrorism-related, consistent with the state-actor nexus through Foxtrot's Iranian links.

The foiled plot left no victim and no identified target, but the conviction establishes a judicial record of the operational pipeline: Scandinavian recruitment, UK-based logistics, and a chain of custody running from a Swedish crime network to a state-linked foreign government. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb's sentencing in October will determine whether the judiciary treats this as an ordinary contract killing or something weightier, with sentencing guidelines for conspiracy to murder allowing for life imprisonment.