A murder plot, rebranded
Two UK outlets report the sentencing of Johannes Natland, 19, to 20 years for conspiracy to murder. The BBC headline calls him a Norwegian teen “hitman” [1]; The Independent’s says “hitman” too [2]. The word comes from thrillers. It implies a professional with a target, a contract and a plan. The facts in both articles are thinner and stranger than that.
The evidence below is limited to two articles. Treat the critique as partly speculative.
The vocabulary of a product
The BBC says the Foxtrot Network pioneered a phenomenon “Europol has called ‘violence-as-a-service’ (VaaS)” [1]. That is a borrowed term from software (“software-as-a-service”), and the BBC passes it along without comment. Orwell’s point in “Politics and the English Language” was that euphemism and borrowed jargon let readers skip the thing described. Here the thing is the recruitment of teenagers to kill. “Service” turns it into a market transaction. It is attributed to Europol, so the BBC is not inventing it, but it also does not say whether the label is useful or just tidy.
The Independent adds a pop-culture layer. Natland was controlled by a boss called “Agent 47”, “in an apparent reference to the Hitman gaming and film franchise” [2]. The detail is in the court record, and it is reported accurately. But with “hitman” in the headline, the story starts to read like the franchise it mentions. Huxley’s version of the worry: violence as entertainment, easy to consume and easy to forget.
What the headlines say and what the facts say
The headline frame is competence. The details are less flattering to that frame:
- The BBC says the target “remain[s] unclear” and quotes Commander Helen Flanagan: “We haven’t been able to establish exactly who the intended victim was” [1]. The judge herself called the target “unidentified” [1][2]. So the “hit” had no known victim.
- The Independent says he claimed he “would have shot himself in the foot” to get out of the “pickle” he was in, and that jurors heard repeated lies after his arrest [2]. The jury rejected this, and the judge said she was sure he would have gone through with it [2]. The Independent quotes the judge on this; the BBC does not.
- Defence counsel described a “young, popular, successful student and sportsman” who went “off the rails” after abusing drugs [2]. Only the Independent includes this, and it sits well below the “hitman” headline.
None of this excuses anything; the jury was unanimous [1]. But “hitman” and “plot” imply a menace the reporting cannot actually locate in a specific person.
A factual discrepancy nobody flags
The BBC says Natland was arrested with “two working guns and 19 rounds of live ammunition” [1]. The Independent says police “seized two guns and 12 live bullets” [2]. These are different numbers for the same arrest. Neither outlet notes the other’s figure, and I cannot tell from these texts which is right, or whether they count different things. The court record or a police statement would settle it. It is a small detail, but it shows how the same story gets repeated with slightly different facts and no sign of the join.
“Backed by the Iranian regime”: attribution by repetition
Both outlets state the Iranian link. The BBC says the Foxtrot Network is “backed by the Iranian regime” as it was “described” to the jury, then adds that it “has been sanctioned by both the UK and the US for its close links to the Iranian government” [1]. The Independent says flatly: “The gang is backed by the Iranian regime” [2], and repeats it in its headline (“linked to Iran gang”) and first paragraph [2].
The sanctions are a verifiable institutional fact, and the BBC cites them. The Independent gives no basis in its article. Neither article shows evidence connecting Natland, or this specific plot, to Iran; the BBC concedes it does not even know the target [1]. The link is to the network, not the plan. A reader who sees “Iran” in a headline and “unknown target” in paragraph six will likely merge them. That may be accurate geopolitics, but these articles don’t establish it for this case.
What a reader would need instead
- The target, or an honest statement that nobody knows, placed high in the piece rather than as a clause.
- The evidence for the Iranian link, or at least a clear separation between the network’s sanctioned status and this plot.
- A plain definition of “violence-as-a-service” and whether it is Europol’s term of art or marketing, with a link to Europol’s own reports.
- Consistent facts: 19 rounds or 12 bullets.
- The sentencing remarks in full. The Independent notes the sentencing was televised [2], so the primary record exists and could be quoted more than it is.
- Language closer to the case: a 19-year-old recruited online, guided by Signal videos [1], paid €25,000 [2], arrested before anything happened. That is disturbing enough without a franchise name.