Badalona is a culturally enriched suburb of Barcelona. In recent years the fights between drug-trafficking gangs in Badalona have become grotesquely violent and deadly. It’s worth noting that these are enricher vs. enricher battles, apparently involving rival Pakistani clans.

Note: photos in the media of the incident described below are gory and/or pixelated, and thus not useful or appropriate for posting here. Readers who are interested in seeing what the mayhem looked liked are invited to follow the link.

Many thanks to FouseSquawk for translating this article from El Pais:

One dead and two gravely injured in a gang fight in Badalona

Various witnesses described a fight with chains, knives and baseball bats

Barcelona
October 28, 2019

The young man, Jean Pierre (19), was clearing up the last tables of the bar where he worked yesterday, in front of the Gorg Metro stop in Badalona, when he saw “a mountain of people coming up from the beach.” He was certain that there were some 30-40, located in the middle of a type of small walkway, they began with insults and “ended up hitting each other with machetes and clubs”. He and his friend closed the doors of the bar because of what could have occurred. One youth died and there two more were gravely wounded in the gang fight that took place Sunday at 10pm, according to what the Catalan police reported. The Urban Guard has detained nine persons, all of Pakistani origin.

The mayor of the municipality, the Socialist Alex Pastor, explained that two clans fighting for territorial control of the drug traffic were there expressly to confront each other. “One of the groups arrived from Barcelona, from the neighborhood of Ciutat Vella”, he indicated in an interview on TV3. On RAC1 the Counselor for the Interior, Miguel Buch, also referred to a settling of accounts over a drug conflict. Fights with knives and clubs have occurred repeatedly in the center of Barcelona in recent years for control of the area. The police have attributed the battles between the clans to attempts to dominate the sale of merchandise and drugs in the center of the city. “They always resolve their conflicts with a lot of violence,” note police sources.

Irene (34) is still shaken. Jean Pierre, a waiter at the bar she is in charge of, called her in the night where she is now seated, telling her what was happening. Upon parking her car, she saw a young guy saying, “I’m dying, I’m dying,” and ran to ask for help from the police. “He raised his red shirt squirting blood from his head to his legs,” she explained. When she arrived at the bar, just a few meters further on, another young man hidden behind a pillar repeated the same: “They told me not to approach, but how was I not going to approach if he was yelling that he was going to die?” He had at least six stab wounds, according to the account by Jean Pierre, who also saw him. “His skin was opened like meat,” describes Irene, who took his pulse, hoping that the ambulance would arrive.

The battle did not last more than ten minutes, say a group of neighbors, who commented in a group about what happened. “They caught one on a corner and beat him without stopping,” they explain among themselves. “It was hard to see,” they say of the fight, which they became aware of from the screams that they heard from their balconies. They had no doubt that the fight had ended very badly. They called the police, but nobody dared to go down into the street. They had never seen anything similar before.

Several images of the fight appeared on social media, where you see some 30 armed people fighting in the street. The witnesses talk of chains, axes, baseball bats and knives. In the area a neighbor found one of the bloodied knives in the morning. “They didn’t come to fight. They came to kill,” continues Irene. Two of the wounded fled into the metro, where they ended up being treated by the Medical Emergencies System (SEM).

On February 9 a man of Dominican origin died after a fight in Barcelona. The Catalan police attribute the death to a conflict between groups dedicated to the drug traffic precisely for the control of space. The victim died of a beating, presumably by a group of Pakistanis.

The Catalan police have carried out several operations against Pakistani gangs who fight in the street for control of the zone where they sell merchandise and drugs. In September 2017, agents arrested members of a band of street vendors, who faced off against another group that arrived from Italy, with whom they has gang fights. Many of those arrested in that operation lived in Badalona.