A shooting with one fatality and one other person seriously injured in Madrid this Tuesday at noon. A 43-year-old Spanish man, identified as Borja Villacís, died after another person shot him several times in the head, in front of a restaurant in the Fuencarral district. The dead man was the brother of former Madrid deputy mayor Begoña Villacís (Ciudadanos). Spanish National Police have arrested a woman as one of the alleged authors of the crime, with two other men still at large. Madrid emergency services received a call reporting a shooting at the Lar de Domingo restaurant, on the road from El Pardo to Fuencarral, the M-612, around half past one, and went to the scene with several Samur ambulances.
Video filmed by nearby workers of the stop made by two of the alleged perpetrators during their getaway when they changed their car's number plates, and then separated.
When emergency services arrived, they found two people with gunshot wounds, one of them, Borja Villacís, with several shots to the head fired at close range, causing the police to speculate about a possible revenge killing. The other person was also injured by a gunshot and was taken, alive, to the nearest hospital. A large deployment of police began to investigate the incident looking for other people involved.
The perpetrators fled in a BMW
Samur medical staff tried to revive the man for several minutes, but without success. Apparently, the shots were fired with a 7.62 calibre assault rifle and witnesses say the perpetrators left the scene in a BMW X2 at high speed. National Police homicide investigators and forensic police were trying to piece together what happened. A first hypothesis was that it was the victim himself who met with the eventual executioners at this location to resolve a possible drug issue, and that the people who fled in the car, allegedly three people including the woman arrested, shot him treacherously out of revenge.
Abandoned weapons found in a nearby field
In parallel, National Police investigated the discovery of bags and boxes containing firearms that appeared in a field in the same Madrid district, Fuencarraral-El Pardo, next to the road going to Alcobendas, close to the headquarters of media producer Mediaset, not far from where the murder of Borja Villacís took place. Police officers removed the weapons from the scene and took them into custody, for expert analysis, and in particular to find out if they might be related to the crime.
Spanish National Police video of the arrested woman: "The investigation continues open", say police.
Police reconstruct what happened
Later in the day, investigators were able to reconstruct the events. Around half past one in the afternoon on the N-612 road, a vehicle with three occupants collided with the victim's, a rental car in which he was travelling with another person. Following the collision, Borja Villacís stopped the vehicle beside the road, at which point two armed men got out of the other vehicle and shot him, allegedly with a hunting rifle, in the chest and head. Then, the gunmen got back into the vehicle, which was driven by a woman, and it left the scene.
After nine kilometres of flight, still in the Madrid district of Fuencarral-El Pardo, right next to the Mediaset facilities, the perpetrators of the crime stopped by the side of the road. A woman and a man got out, changed the number plates of the car for others that they had previously prepared. After that, the man jumped over a wall and hid the old plates under a tree. He then took a large object and left it in a field, where the third person involved in the crime was waiting for him. In the end, both men left running in the direction of the M-40 motorway, while the woman left by herself in the car. The woman was later arrested at a gas station; the two men are still at large.
A member of Ultras Sur accused of drug trafficking
Borja Villacís was facing charges of drug trafficking and large-scale money laundering in the the National Audience criminal court. He was also linked to the Ultras Sur, an extreme right-wing group linked to Real Madrid, declared a violent radical group in 2019 by the State Commission against Violence.
In fact, in 2012, the Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced him to six months' imprisonment and a compensation payment of 9,402 euros for assaulting two men, hitting one on the head with a broken bottle, and for insulting a woman because of her skin colour on a metro train in the Spanish capital.
The deceased man's sister, Begoña Villacís, is a lawyer and politician who served as a deputy mayor of Madrid in the city government of mayor Martínez-Almeida (People's Party) between 2019 and 2023, and was spokesperson for Ciudadanos on the Madrid City Council, before leaving politics in 2023.