Natland grew up in the oil city of Stavanger in south-west Norway.

The son of two journalists, and a promising young footballer, he started taking drugs aged 13.

He told the Old Bailey that by last year he was taking drugs “pretty much every day”.

He dropped out of school, and after becoming paranoid that his parents were trying to kill him, he ended up in a psychiatric unit with drug-induced psychosis.

He said he then spent a short period in a “home for problem children” where he met one of those who later recruited him to the Foxtrot Network, a teenager with the username UnknownHustler.

On 15 March 2025, UnknownHustler forwarded him a message, which was in effect a Foxtrot online tender for business, known by police as VaaS.

The Foxtrot tender was blunt – “Killing in England 270k. Have transport ready out of the country. Will smuggle assassin out of the country. The police will be paid to look the other way. Nothing can go wrong.” (270,000 Norwegian Kroner is about £21,000.)

Natland was then added to a group with Generalen and Agent 47. The group name was Assassin EU.

The first message he posted in the group was “Who is to be killed?”

It is not clear that he ever got the answer to that question right up to the moment he was arrested with two guns under his hotel room bed.

The next day, 16 March, Agent 47 booked Natland’s one-way air ticket to the UK.

On 17 March, just two days after he had been recruited, Natland flew from Stavanger to Manchester, using an emergency passport, as his normal one had expired.

On arrival at Manchester, he was detained and questioned, as UK Border Force officers were suspicious about his emergency passport, and his lack of money, hotel booking, or return air ticket.

They refused him entry, but let him enter temporarily anyway as the next flight back to Stavanger was not for three days. The contract hit was still on.