Two young people arrested for the robberies of teenagers that put the upper area of Barcelona on alert

BarcelonaThe Mossos d'Esquadra have arrested two boys aged 19 and 20 as the alleged perpetrators of the robberies against minors that had put the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district on alert in recent days. The alarm was mainly raised after they held up and assaulted a group of teenagers in the early hours of October 10th at the intersection of Bertrand i Serra and Torras i Pujalt streets with a fake gun. According to police sources, the youths explained that the assailants stole various personal items from them, including mobile phones, clothing, and footwear.

The two individuals were traveling on a stolen motorcycle and it was not the only robbery they committed that day. A few hours earlier, around 10 p.m., two men on a motorcycle also tried to steal a person's belongings on Escoles Pies street, in Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, but fled without taking anything. Shortly after, around one in the morning on Sunday, there was another incident in Sant Cugat del Vallès. In this case, however, the motorcyclists did steal a mobile phone. In total, on October 10th they committed four robberies, all against minors.

Now the Mossos have discovered that they are old acquaintances of the police, as they had already acted on October 3rd and one of them had even been arrested, although he was released on provisional liberty a few hours later and was arrested again. The police investigation began that same day with the theft of a car in Sarrià. The victim was inside the car, which was parked, when two individuals riding a motorcycle approached him. According to the complaint, one of the perpetrators threatened him with a firearm and forced him to abandon the vehicle.

The next day, in the early morning, two underage girls were victims of a robbery with violence and intimidation on Ganduixer street in Barcelona. According to their statement, an individual who got out of a vehicle threatened them with what appeared to be a firearm and stole various personal items from them. In the early hours of October 5th, Mossos agents detected the stolen vehicle driving erratically in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The car lost control and had an accident. Immediately, however, one of the occupants of the car fled on foot and was chased by the agents.

During the escape, the man threw away a short firearm, which turned out to be fake, and was eventually arrested, although he was released a few hours later. The other boy managed to escape. Inside the car, the Mossos found the objects they had recently stolen from the two minors. Finally, this Wednesday, the Catalan police arrested them again at a home in the Eixample. During the entry, the police seized two fake short firearms.

Crimes on the decline

These robberies created social alarm in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district, a basic police area where, despite this, there is no record of an increase in robberies. As ARA has learned, up to October 15 –and, therefore, counting the robberies allegedly committed by these two boys– robberies with violence and intimidation have fallen by 1.3% compared to the same period in 2025. In parallel, minor thefts have fallen by 12.1% and thefts by 3.4%.

In fact, if we speak only of robberies with violence and intimidation, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi was in 2025 the second district with the fewest crimes per inhabitant of this kind, only behind Gràcia. In fact, the rate for Sarrià is 2.54 crimes per 1,000 inhabitants, while that of Ciutat Vella is 36.14 –a ratio skewed by the high number of tourists in that area who are not counted in the census– and that of Eixample is 8.5, according to the open data from the Mossos consulted by ARA.