A Swedish gang run from Iran hires children on social media to commit murders abroad
Swedish journalist Diamant Salihu says leader Rawa Majid is believed to coordinate attacks from Iran and have recruits arrested so the gang avoids paying them.
Global News Podcast · Trump fires press secretary Katie ZachariaAn 18-year-old from Norway flew to England to commit a murder he had agreed to just two days earlier. Johannes Natland was arrested in a hotel room in Huddersfield, in northern England, with two guns and 19 rounds of ammunition. A judge who sentenced him to 20 years in prison said she believed he would have carried out the killing if counterterrorism police had not intervened.
Natland had been hired online by the Foxtrot Network, a Sweden-based crime operation that hires teenagers to commit violent acts for paying clients, including the Iranian state. The gang uses people far from its leader and treats recruits as expendable. Its leader, Rawa Majid, lives in Iran, where Swedish investigative journalist Diamant Salihu says he is considered to be coordinating attacks on gang rivals and on Israeli targets.
From there, recruiters post help-wanted ads for shootings, bombings, and extortion on Telegram, Instagram, and TikTok. The pitch is money and status, and the target is vulnerable teenagers. Salihu says Foxtrot has armed 13-year-olds and used 15-year-olds as killers. Natland picked up his guns in woodland in Huddersfield after landing in Manchester, and police have not yet established who his intended victim was, or who had paid for the killing.
The teenagers are not driven by ideology, Salihu says. They are not radicalized youths so much as youths radicalized by the gang, and used opportunistically. Salihu says Majid, in the custody of the Iranian regime, uses his network to keep that regime happy.
Salihu says the gang wants recruits to be arrested so it does not have to pay them. The operation continues despite arrests of recruiters in Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco following work by Swedish authorities, and despite a new power since the summer for Swedish police to order social media companies to remove murder ads within an hour or face fines. The leader remains free, new ads keep appearing, and children have even been recruited from inside Sweden's social service homes meant to protect them.
Questions people ask
Why would a gang want to use a 13-year-old instead of an adult?
Sweden treats children under 15 as below the age of criminal responsibility, so they cannot be sentenced to prison, and sentences for older teenagers are generally much lighter than for adults. Gangs exploit that protection by using the youngest possible shooters, knowing the legal risk falls mainly on the child.
Who is Rawa Majid, the Foxtrot leader?
Rawa Majid is a Swedish citizen of Iraqi Kurdish background who built Foxtrot as a drug-trafficking gang in Sweden before splitting with rivals and fleeing abroad. Sweden, the United States, and the European Union have sanctioned him for working with Iran, and Turkey briefly detained him in 2023 before releasing him.
Why would Iran work with a Swedish street gang?
Iran has been accused by Western governments of using criminal proxies to attack Israeli and Jewish targets and dissidents in Europe when it wants deniability. A gang already skilled at moving drugs, guns, and teenagers across borders offers Tehran a ready supply of operatives with no visible link to Iran.