LONDON — Ten days after his 18th birthday, Johannes Natland flew to England on an emergency passport, because his own had expired, to shoot a stranger for money. On Friday a judge sent him to prison for 20 years.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb sentenced the 19-year-old Norwegian at the Central Criminal Court, sitting at Woolwich Crown Court. He will be released on licence after 13 years and four months. The ruling comes days after London blamed Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for the RAF Fairford Iran plot, and it asks a narrower question: what can actually be proved.
On Iran, the court could not get far. The judge said prosecutors lacked the evidence for a foreign-power aggravation because they cannot say who the intended victim was. Counter Terrorism Policing, which led the inquiry, said it “found no evidence of any direct link to Iran in this case.”
Police still placed him inside the Foxtrot Network. Counter Terrorism Policing said the Swedish group is sanctioned by Britain and the United States for “orchestrating violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime.” That is the two governments’ characterisation, not a finding of this court, and it sits inside strained Iran-United Kingdom relations.
Tehran has rejected such claims before. Iran International reported in 2024 that it had called Swedish accusations that it uses criminal networks “baseless”. On Tuesday it demanded London’s evidence over Fairford, Anadolu reported, the day the MI5 chief’s warning about Iranian criminal proxies landed.
What the court heard about was an advert. As the judge set out in her sentencing remarks, it read “Murder in England 270,000 [Krona, approximately £21,000]” and reached Natland on Signal on 15 March 2025 from a teenager he had met in a care home. He “agreed to be the enforcer and pursued it, despite numerous opportunities to extricate yourself,” she told him.
Armed police arrested him at a Huddersfield hotel in the early hours of 19 March 2025 with two guns and 19 bullets, according to the judge and police. A Crown Prosecution Service release in July counted 12 rounds, a gap neither document explains. Natland told jurors he meant to shoot himself in the foot. The judge was “sure” he would have gone through with it, and a retrial jury convicted him on 29 July.
She cut a notional 24-year term to 20 for his age and immaturity, found no duress or grooming, and said enforcers in such networks are “almost always below the age of 20”. His “expendability was part of the attraction” for Foxtrot, she added.
Police say the investigation continues into people who helped him obtain the guns and a stolen car. A 27-year-old arrested in September 2025 on suspicion of conspiracy to murder was released under investigation. The police statement lists no charges against anyone else.
Nobody in open court has said who the target was.
