A subinspector of the Policía Nacional died in Oviedo on Tuesday after a backpack bomb exploded during a police inspection, and a TEDAX agent was left seriously injured with one leg amputated. The blast ripped through a tense operation in the Villafría neighborhood, where officers had gone after gunshots were reported earlier in the morning.
The first alarm came at about 7:00 on calle Rafael Urrusti, where a violent dispute in a social housing building ended in a shooting. A young woman was hit by a bullet and rushed to HUCA, while the shooter fled and, police suspect, left a backpack beside the building entrance before disappearing through the neighborhood. By 8:45, officers had reached the scene after neighbors called in the gunfire and found the suspicious package.
The explosion came as specialists were following the inspection protocol inside the building. The officer who died belonged to the Guías Caninos unit, a detail that underlines how quickly a routine check turned lethal. Preliminary TEDAX analysis later pointed to a homemade device made with aluminum and ammonia, a crude mix that can still produce a violent blast when confined in a small container.
That is what makes this case more than a shooting that went wrong. The gunman’s flight and the abandoned backpack transformed a neighborhood dispute into a wider attack on the police response itself, forcing Científica to collect samples at the scene while the area around calle Rafael Urrusti was fully cordoned off. The Policía Nacional kept a large search operation under way to find the fugitive and the person responsible for the explosion.
The unanswered question is not whether Oviedo was shaken — it was — but whether the same person who fired the shots also designed the trap that killed the subinspector and maimed the TEDAX agent. The police hypothesis points that way, but the manhunt remained active after the blast, and the city was left waiting for the arrest that would close the circle.
