A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD boy has been shot dead in a Barcelona park after a group of youths approached him and opened fire.
The shooting happened shortly before 11pm on Thursday, July 2, in the Parc de la Pegaso, in the La Sagrera neighbourhood of Barcelona’s Sant Andreu district.
The attackers, numbering between four and seven according to Catalan crime outlet ElCaso.cat, approached the teenager while he was in the park with two other people.
He was shot at least twice, including once in the stomach, before the attackers fled towards Avinguda Meridiana, witnesses said.
Some of the attackers had their faces covered and were also carrying an edged weapon, possibly a machete, which injured other people nearby, according to witness accounts.
Emergency services attempted to resuscitate the boy but could not save him, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Officers later recovered a spent 9mm cartridge case at the site, police sources said.
Nuria Parlon, Catalunya’s interior minister, said online that the killing amounted to the ‘utmost expression of violence’ and that initial indications from the investigation ‘point to clashes between gangs.’
No one had been arrested as of Friday morning.
Mossos d’Esquadra’s homicide unit in Barcelona has taken over the investigation, with armed units and forensic officers deployed to the park overnight to review CCTV footage and take witness statements.
The killing is Catalunya’s seventh fatal shooting of 2026, matching the region’s total for the whole of last year in just six months, according to Mossos d’Esquadra figures.
Five of this year’s victims died in Barcelona, one in Badalona and one in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Mossos d’Esquadra raised the alarm over rising shootings in May, revealing that Catalunya logged 93 shootings in 2025, a 35% increase on the 69 recorded in 2024.
READ MORE: Woman shot in the leg over one kilo of cocaine during drug heist gone wrong in Barcelona’s old town
That works out at roughly one shooting every four days across the region last year.
Ramon Chacon, head of the Comissaria General d’Investigacio Criminal (Catalunya’s general criminal investigation commission), said officers were ‘concerned’ about the rise, even though firearm homicides have actually fallen.
He said it was ‘strange’ that shootings were increasing while every other indicator around firearms was improving, and pointed to growing normalisation of guns among criminals linked to marijuana cultivation and trafficking.
READ MORE: WATCH: Chaos in Barcelona as knife-wielding man chases pedestrians through upmarket barrio
Speaking earlier in the week, before Thursday’s shooting, Mossos director general Josep Lluis Trapero said the rise was being driven by marijuana production and a growing willingness among young people to carry and display weapons.
He said this did not amount to a ‘generalised gun culture’ in Catalunya.
Click here to read more Barcelona News from The Olive Press.
