Crimes in Catalonia: Fifty people have been shot dead in the last five years.

BarcelonaAn autopsy room is cold and bright. Everything is clean, metallic, and dazzling, from the bunks to the lamps, utensils, and refrigerators. The autopsy rooms of the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Catalonia (IMLCFC) are in the basement of the City of Justice, a kind of underground hospital (the smell is similar). There are four double autopsy rooms and one single room. We enter the one with a few chairs through a glass window. As if in a movie theater, students and future judges sit and watch the autopsies in action.

During the first half of 2025, the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Sciences performed 2,242 autopsies, up to twelve each day. And every year they do more. Of all of them, only a small proportion involve murder. 65% are natural deaths—when they occur in people under 30, a molecular autopsy is performed—and only 1.5% are crimes. Around 10% are suicides, and accidents are close to 20%. Summer is a busy time of year, because autopsies are also performed on drowning deaths: in 25% of these cases, alcohol is found in the blood, but the health status or age of the deceased plays a key role.

In the case of a homicide, the key is determining the cause of death. Autopsies typically last between one and two hours. However, in complex crimes and cases, they can take up to four hours. These dissections not only determine the cause of death, but also perform toxicological analyses and attempt to extract remains of the perpetrator from the victim's body: a hair, a piece of clothing, saliva... Any clue that might aid the police investigation.

Record

In the last five years, from 2019 to 2024, the IMLCFC has analyzed the bodies of 345 murdered people. 68.7% were men—the percentage of male perpetrators of homicides is also very high—and the year with the most crimes was 2023, with 70, a record number that was slightly lowered in 2024 (64).

A growing problem, the Mossos d'Esquadra warn, is the increasing proliferation of firearms. In the last five years, up to 56 people have been treated at the Institute's autopsy rooms with gunshot wounds. The record year, once again, was 2023, with 18 deaths from firearms. In previous years, this figure had never exceeded eight. Last year closed with nine deaths from gunshot wounds.

Now, the most common murder weapon is the knife. Of the 345 homicides analyzed by the Institute, 169 were committed with a knife. Consistently, around thirty crimes of this type are committed every year. And here the victim profile changes: more than 30% are women. This, according to police sources, is because knives are present in most sexist crimes, as it's the first thing the attacker finds to harm the victim.

Organized crime

In contrast, in the case of firearms, 80% of fatalities are men, and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) directly link these homicides to organized crime. When marijuana plantations spread across the country, the first drug robberies or robberies between criminal groups began. This led to the gangs arming themselves.

The latest evidence of firearms use in Catalonia is located in the crime of the Eixample of BarcelonaA Serbian citizen was shot dead in broad daylight on Consell de Cent Street two weeks ago. The main hypothesis is revenge: according to police sources, the victim—who had a gun at home—was allegedly part of the Serbian mafia and had participated in the murder of members of the rival Montenegrin mafia.