In a Stockholm suburb, a man dressed in black emerged from the winter night carrying a handgun. He approached 20-year-old Murad Abdelkader, a student walking home after a shift at McDonald’s, and opened fire repeatedly as he closed in, firing his final shot into the young man’s head as he lay helpless on the ground.
The killer, 18-year-old Atilla Azimov, had targeted the wrong man on that February night last year. He had carried out the killing for money, hired by the Foxtrot Network, an organized crime group with ties to the Iranian regime that has become notorious for its “violence-as-a-service” model.
Since 2022, the Foxtrot Network is believed to be responsible for roughly 35 murders, along with numerous attacks and attempted attacks on Israeli targets across Europe, including two involving explosives and hand grenades. The network recruits teenagers to carry out its violence in exchange for cash, though it rarely has to pay out, since many of its young recruits are caught before or after completing their assignments.
One such case is Johannes Natland, a Norwegian teenager convicted of conspiracy to murder by a jury at London’s Old Bailey on Wednesday over a planned killing in West Yorkshire. According to Operational Taskforce GRIMM, the Europol-led group formed to tackle the phenomenon, these teenage hitmen are recruited through social media and given instructions in a “gamified” format that mimics video game mechanics. Andy Kraag, head of Europol’s European Serious and Organized Crime Centre, describes the practice as “the calculated outsourcing of murder” to vulnerable young people. OTF GRIMM currently spans 11 countries affected by the violence-as-a-service trend: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
A Network Rooted in Tehran
Foxtrot’s leader, Rawa Majid, fled Sweden and later his operating base in Turkey and is now based in Tehran. Police believe some of the network’s attacks, including a hand grenade attack on the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen, have been carried out on behalf of the Iranian regime, while other attacks stem from Foxtrot’s ongoing drug turf wars.
Diamant Salihu, an investigative journalist with Swedish broadcaster SVT who has spent three years researching Foxtrot’s Iranian links, said the regime effectively directs Majid to order attacks against its enemies. “It can be dissidents and journalists that are in the opposition against the regime, and it can also be Israeli targets,” he said. According to Salihu, the relationship with Tehran began after Majid fled there in October 2023, striking a deal that allowed him to live freely in Iran on the condition that he and his network work on the regime’s behalf.
The Foxtrot Network and Majid were sanctioned by the UK government in April 2025, the same month Natland, then 18, was arrested after flying in to carry out a hit for Foxtrot near Huddersfield.
How the System Recruits
Natland’s case illustrates how the violence-as-a-service pipeline operates. The son of two journalists in Stavanger, Natland had a comfortable upbringing but drifted into drug use and developed psychosis, eventually spending time in rehab and briefly in a children’s home. It was there that he met another teenager who went by the online handle UnknownHustler.
