Oviedo: a Spanish Police Officer Is Killed and Another Gravely Wounded When a Backpack Explodes After a Neighbourhood Shooting
Officers answering a shooting that wounded a 17-year-old girl found a backpack in a building entrance in the Villafria district. It detonated as a canine-unit officer inspected it - and police closed the roads into the city hunting the gunman.
A Spanish National Police officer was killed and another seriously injured on Tuesday morning in Oviedo, in northern Spain, when an explosive device inside a backpack detonated as officers responded to a neighbourhood dispute that had already turned violent, Reuters reported. The dispute between two families began when a man shot and injured a young woman; a spokesperson for the local council told Reuters she was no longer in danger.
The sequence, as Spanish reporting assembled it on Tuesday, started with shots at about 7:30 a.m. in the Villafria district, where a 17-year-old girl was wounded and taken to the Central University Hospital of Asturias. Officers responding to the shooting found a partly open backpack in the entrance of a building on Rafael Urrusti Street and called in specialists. Shortly before 9 a.m., as a sub-inspector from the police canine unit inspected the bag, it exploded, killing him; the force named him as Juan Jose. The second officer, an explosives specialist with the TEDAX bomb-disposal unit who was working beside him, lost a leg, according to the police union JUPOL as reported by El Constitucional.
The National Police posted that it was devastated by the death of its canine-unit colleague and wished the injured TEDAX officer a speedy recovery. Oviedo's mayor, Alfredo Canteli, went to the scene as investigators cordoned off the area, and police closed roads into the city while they hunted for the shooting suspect, who they said could be armed. Police sources told Spanish media the suspect had an extensive record for ordinary crimes and that a terrorist motive had been ruled out for now.
The story led the United States' search charts on Tuesday morning - 'oviedo' was the No. 1 trending Google search in the country on the board this desk read at the morning pull - as the first full accounts reached English-language readers. What sent officers to Villafria, who left the backpack, and whether the two attacks are one man's work were all still open questions at midday in Spain, and this desk will update the file only on officials' confirmed word.
