Teen Hitmen for Hire: How Foxtrot Network Gamifies Murder Across Europe

On a February night in a Stockholm suburb, an eighteen-year-old named Atilla Azimov stepped out of the darkness with a handgun. He fired repeatedly at a twenty-year-old student named Murad Abdelkader, who was walking home from his shift at McDonald's. When Abdelkader fell, Azimov fired once more into his head. The killing was methodical, but it was also a mistake—Azimov had shot the wrong man. He had done it for money, hired through an organization called the Foxtrot Network, a criminal enterprise with ties to Iran's government that has turned murder into a service it sells to the young and desperate.

Since 2022, the Foxtrot Network is believed to have orchestrated roughly thirty-five murders across Europe, along with numerous attacks and attempted attacks on Israeli targets, some involving explosives and grenades. What makes the group distinctive—and alarming—is how it recruits. It finds vulnerable teenagers on social media, then instructs them to kill using the same language and logic as a video game. The teenagers are promised money. They almost never receive it, because most are arrested before they can collect. The network does not seem to care. In fact, the younger the recruit, the better, because adolescents are less likely to weigh consequences and more willing to accept risk.

The operation is run by Rawa Majid, who fled Sweden and later Turkey to establish himself in Tehran, where he now operates under the protection of the Iranian regime. According to Diamant Salihu, an investigative journalist who has spent three years studying Foxtrot's structure, the arrangement is transactional. "He had to make a deal to be able to live freely in Iran, under condition that he and his network work for the regime," Salihu explained. Some of the killings are political—targeting dissidents, journalists, and Israeli interests. Others are part of Foxtrot's own drug wars. The distinction matters less than the scale: eleven European countries are now affected by what law enforcement calls violence-as-a-service, or VaaS.

The case of Johannes Natland, a Norwegian teenager, shows how the machinery operates. Natland came from a stable background—his parents were journalists—but he drifted into drugs, developed psychosis, and spent time in rehabilitation and a children's home. There he encountered another teenager using the online alias UnknownHustler, who sent him a message: "Killing in England 270k." That was 270,000 Norwegian kroner, roughly twenty-one thousand pounds. The message had originated from a sixteen-year-old calling himself Generalen, who had spent the previous three years in a children's home and was now recruiting killers for Foxtrot.

Generalen passed Natland to a Foxtrot operative with the username Agent 47, borrowed from the Hitman video game franchise. Swedish police believe this person is Ali Shehad Ahmed, someone close to Majid. Agent 47 booked Natland's one-way ticket to Manchester Airport and helped him obtain an emergency passport. Using Signal, a messaging app, Agent 47 guided him through every step. Once Natland arrived in Huddersfield, he was handed off to a logistics coordinator with the username "1," who sent him maps and videos showing where guns were hidden in the woods and where cash was stashed near a foot tunnel. The entire operation was structured like a game, with objectives, resources, and waypoints. "We have much to do tomorrow," Agent 47 messaged. Natland was arrested the next morning, before he was even told who his target was. Counterterrorism detectives are still uncertain whether he was meant to kill a criminal rival or a political enemy of Iran.

Generalen was prolific. Beyond Natland, he recruited at least two people who carried out actual murders in Sweden. One was Azimov, the eighteen-year-old who killed Murad Abdelkader and is now serving a life sentence. The other was a seventeen-year-old who shot Ahmed Zamzam in Lund three and a half weeks before Azimov's killing. Neither killer was paid, because neither escaped arrest. This is not a flaw in Foxtrot's model—it is the model. The network saves money by recruiting children who will be caught, and it grooms younger and younger recruits because they are less likely to think about consequences. Generalen himself was eventually stopped when he tried to arrange the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy whose father was a Norwegian police officer. He recruited two teenagers to carry out a knife attack, but the younger one, fifteen years old, reported him to police. When detectives arrested Generalen, they found details of the Huddersfield plot on his phone, which led British authorities to arrest Natland just in time. Generalen was convicted in May and is serving fourteen years.

Europol's Operational Taskforce GRIMM, established to combat VaaS across eleven countries, has made more than two hundred eighty arrests in its first fifteen months, including some significant figures. Ali Shehad Ahmed, believed to be Agent 47, was detained in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq and faces extradition to Sweden. Mohamed Mohdhi, a former rapper described by Swedish police as central to Foxtrot's operations, was arrested in Tunisia in May. But Rawa Majid remains beyond reach in Tehran, still active, still directing operations. The danger is not contained. Other criminal organizations, including Foxtrot's rival the Dalen Network, have already adopted the VaaS model, recruiting teenagers the same way. The method spread quickly from Sweden through Scandinavia and northern Europe, and as Natland's case demonstrated, it has reached the United Kingdom. What began as one network's innovation is becoming an industry standard.