Suspected son kills parents, injures four in southern Spain shooting

A 25-year-old man was suspected of killing his parents and injuring four other people in El Ejido, in Spain’s Almería province, in a shooting that quickly spread beyond a family dispute into a wider public safety emergency.

Police said the attack was reported late Monday night, around 11:15 p.m. local time, near the El Canalillo area in southern Spain. When officers reached the scene, they found a car riddled with bullet holes and a married couple dead inside. The two dead victims were believed to be the suspect’s parents, and the man was later taken into custody by Spain’s Civil Guard after allegedly fleeing the scene.

Four other people were seriously injured. Two of them were minors: one was reportedly the suspect’s seven-month-old son, and the other was a two-year-old child. The injured adults included a man and a woman, deepening the toll of a shooting that left multiple generations of one family and nearby bystanders caught in the violence.

Civil Guard officers are leading the investigation in El Ejido, a municipality in Andalusia that has repeatedly surfaced in Spanish headlines in recent years over public-order and violence concerns. The focus now is on reconstructing how the attack unfolded, why it happened, and how the suspect obtained the weapon used in the shooting.

The case has drawn particular attention because of the ages of the injured children and the alleged family link between the suspect and the dead couple. In a country where gun violence is far less common than in the United States, the shooting underscored how quickly a domestic confrontation can become a broader threat to public safety when firearms are involved.

Officials have not publicly detailed a motive, and investigators have not released further information about the condition of the injured victims beyond saying they were seriously hurt. The Civil Guard’s inquiry is expected to determine the sequence of events in El Ejido and whether any additional people were involved before the suspect was detained.