THE identity of a man shot dead on Calle Balmes has finally been revealed nearly a week after the shocking broad daylight hit.
The Mossos d’Esquadra have confirmed the identity of the man, killed in central Barcelona last Wednesday, was a Serbian national carrying multiple false identities and subject to a European Arrest Warrant issued by Belgian authorities.
The official confirmation ended four days of uncertainty during which the victim’s use of multiple identities had made formal identification exceptionally difficult.
The Mossos have named the investigation Case Diamond.
The victim – described as a young man – was shot once in the head at around 9.50am on June 10 at the corner of Calle Balmes and Granada del Penedes, in Barcelona’s upmarket Sant Gervasi district, directly opposite a Policia Nacional ID and passport office.
A Policia Nacional officer stationed at the building gave immediate chase after the shot rang out, joined by a witness, but both were unsuccessful.
The gunman, wearing a beige t-shirt and shorts and carrying a bicycle helmet, fled on foot down Granada del Penedes towards Via Augusta.
A gun and ammunition were found in the vicinity of the shooting. Unusually, the police released CCTV images of the suspect taken from the police station’s own cameras.
The victim’s Serbian nationality and Belgian arrest warrant are consistent with the Balkan organised crime networks that investigators and the OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) have tracked spreading into Spanish cities as part of an ongoing war between rival Serbian criminal factions.
Initial reports in the Irish press suggested the victim may have been an Irishman – the brother of a well-known ex-Republic of Ireland star with links to the infamous Kinahan cartel.
But Garda sources subsequently confirmed that although the Irish national was reported missing on the same day as the Barcelona murder, he was based in southern Spain more than 1,000 kilometres from Barcelona, and was a separate and unrelated case.
The killing is the latest in a sharp surge of gun violence in the Catalan capital driven in part by a gang war waged by Balkan clans.
Three days earlier, a Serbian man of around 40 was shot in the back with an automatic weapon at about 9pm on Calle Mineria in the Zona Franca neighbourhood.
Just two months ago, on April 14, a particularly grisly murder was recorded when two men in black approached Krsto Vujic, 44, known as ‘The Terminator’, while he sat outside the Kibo cafe with a woman and a baby on a pleasant spring morning.
They fired five shots, four of which hit him, while a passer-by was slightly wounded. Vujic, a senior figure in the Skaljari clan, died in hospital days later.
There have been further related murders in Castaldefells last December Eixample in Kuly 2025.
As The Olive Press has previously reported, there have been at least 30 shootings in Barcelona this year — up 45% on the same period in 2025.
Barcelona was on heightened security alert at the time of the killing due to the arrival of Pope Leo XIV for the inauguration of a new tower at the Sagrada Familia, but authorities confirmed the murder was unrelated to the papal visit.
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