A dangerous “violence-as-a-service” (VaaS) network — criminal activity carried out for money — has spread across Europe, in which organised crime rings are luring minors and teenagers with large sums of money to use them as contract killers, the BBC has reported.
At the top of these criminal networks is the “Foxtrot Network”, which is run from Sweden but whose core network is now linked to armed groups and authorities in Iran, the investigation found. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and police, teenagers are manipulated on messaging apps and social media as if in a computer game and handed killing missions.
Gang coordinators then send them the geographic locations of weapons and cash in a highly organised way. Since 2022, the Foxtrot Network is believed to have been involved in about 35 killings across Europe and in several explosive and grenade attacks on Israeli targets.
Recently, a jury at London’s Old Bailey found an 18-year-old Norwegian, Johannes Nutland, guilty of plotting a contract killing in Britain. The investigation found he had been sent to kill someone in Britain for just £21,000.
Foxtrot Network members using the aliases “Agent 47” and “Generalen” had directed Nutland throughout the process like a character in a computer game. But UK counter-terrorism police managed to arrest him in time. The Foxtrot gang’s chief, Rawa Majid, has fled Sweden and Turkey and is now in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
An investigative journalist with the Swedish broadcaster SVT, Diamant Salihu, said that in exchange for living freely in Tehran, Rawa Majid and his network had struck a deal to strike Iran’s domestic and international enemies. Their targets include dissidents, journalists and Israeli installations. The UK government imposed sanctions on Majid and his Foxtrot Network in April 2025.
The international police agency Europol has formed a joint task force of 11 countries, “OTF Grimm”, to counter such teenage hitman gangs. Europol officer Andy Kragh described it as using vulnerable young people “cheaply for killing”. The investigation found that although these criminal rings dangle large sums before the young, they pay nothing at all if the youths are caught or once the job is done.
Very recently, one of Foxtrot’s main coordinators, Ali Shehad Ahmed, was arrested in Iraq. But with other criminal rings now adopting this VaaS model, the risk of young people across Europe being drawn into such violence remains.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report