The Foxtrot Network hitmen case is exposing how an organised crime group with links to the Iranian regime has used teenagers as disposable contract killers across Europe. In one Stockholm suburb, 18-year-old Atilla Azimov shot dead the wrong man after being hired for cash. The victim, 20-year-old Murad Abdelkader, was walking home after a shift at McDonald’s when the gunman opened fire in the winter night.
Azimov’s killing was only one part of a wider pattern. Since 2022, the Foxtrot Network is thought to have been responsible for about 35 murders, along with several attacks and attempted attacks on Israeli targets in Europe. Those incidents include two that involved explosives and hand grenades. Police and investigators say the group has built a business model around violence-as-a-service, using young people to carry out attacks it wants done quickly and cheaply.
The method is as crude as it is calculated. According to Europol’s Operational Taskforce GRIMM, which was created to confront this problem, the teenage recruits are found on social media and then guided through assignments in a gamified way that echoes computer games. Andy Kraag, who leads Europol’s European Serious and Organised Crime Centre, has described it as the calculated outsourcing of murder to vulnerable young people. OTF GRIMM now includes 11 countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
At the center of the network is Rawa Majid, the Foxtrot leader who has fled Sweden and later lived in Turkey before ending up in Tehran, according to police. Investigators believe some of the attacks have been carried out for the Iranian regime, including a hand grenade strike on the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen. Others appear tied to Foxtrot’s own drug wars. Swedish investigative journalist Diamant Salihu, who has studied the group for three years, said the regime is ordering Majid to direct attacks against its enemies, including dissidents, journalists and Israeli targets. He said the relationship began after October 2023, when Majid fled to Tehran and, in Salihu’s view, had to strike a deal to live freely there.
The Foxtrot Network hitmen case came into sharper focus after the arrest of Norwegian teenager Johannes Natland, who was convicted by a jury at the Old Bailey in London on Wednesday of conspiracy to murder in a planned West Yorkshire killing. Natland, who was 18 when arrested, had been recruited online through a chain of teenage intermediaries. A request promising “Killing in England 270k” first reached him through a contact known as UnknownHustler, who had received it from another teenager called Generalen. Generalen then passed Natland to a Foxtrot figure using the handle Agent 47, a name borrowed from the Hitman game franchise.
