Families had gathered for one last night of music and fairground rides when an attraction’s door opened while its tilted platform was still spinning. Within minutes, the fair was filled with ambulances and two girls were on their way to hospital with fractures.

The ride door accidentally opened and sent the children flying

Nine people were injured, eight of them minors, in the accident at Tona’s Festa Major in Barcelona province shortly before midnight on Tuesday August 4. The attraction, identified locally as Disco Show, is one of the classic rides that can usually be found in a Spanish feria: an inclined platform that spins relatively fast, forward and backwards, to music. For reasons that have not yet been established, one of its doors opened while the ride was in motion and several young riders were reportedly thrown from it.

The accident happened on the fifth and final night of the town’s summer fair, which had opened on Friday July 31. Tuesday’s rides were scheduled to keep operating until 1am, but the fair instead closed under the lights of emergency vehicles. The ride in question was sealed so that technical experts could examine it, and the remaining attractions at the fairground, beside Tona’s La Canal venue, were also closed after the accident.

Two unlucky girls suffered fractures

Two girls aged 12 and 14 suffered fractures and were taken to Hospital de Vic. Updated information from municipal sources described their condition as less serious and said their lives were not in danger. Three other young people with minor injuries were also taken to the hospital. Four further patients, including the only adult among those injured, were treated at the scene for minor contusions.

Several ambulances from Cataluña’s Medical Emergency System (SEM) attended, together with three fire service units and patrols from the Mossos d’Esquadra regional police and Tona’s local police. Tona Town Council sent its support to those affected and their families and wished them a swift recovery.

Tona required engineering checks before the fair opened

Official council documents show that rides at the 2026 Festa Major were subject to several layers of paperwork and technical checks. Operators had to submit proof of civil liability insurance and an annual review certificate issued by a registered industrial engineer. Once a ride had been installed in Tona, a further engineer’s certificate was required to confirm its safety and structural soundness. The council’s rules also required every attraction to pass a technical inspection covering the correct assembly and operation of its electrical, mechanical and other systems. The resulting certificate had to be filed before 1pm on July 31, and the rules stated that no ride could begin operating without it and the other required documents.

The council has not publicly released the Disco Show’s inspection file or identified any problem with its permissions or certificates.

Why the next feria ride could feel different

Fairground rides are a familiar part of summer fiestas across Spain, particularly for children and teenagers. After Tona, some families may find themselves looking more closely at the safety bar or closed door before a ride begins.

Nothing reported so far suggests a wider problem at Spain’s fairgrounds, and one unexplained failure shouldn’t be treated as evidence that every ride elsewhere is unsafe. This should offer some reassurance, but it does not lessen what happened in Tona. A final night of lights, music and family fun ended with nine people injured, two girls in hospital with fractures and families waiting to understand how the door opened.

Officers watched an upmarket home for days in Sitges while the wanted 21-year-old inside never ventured beyond its surrounding garden. Then, amid concerns that guns or explosives could be inside, Spanish police entered. 

The garden was as far as the fugitive would go 

The search began in June 2025 through the European Network of Fugitive Active Search Teams (ENFAST), which allows specialist police units to exchange information and pursue wanted people across borders. After months of cooperation between Sweden and Spain, investigators traced the fugitive to Sitges, the affluent seaside town approximately 35 kilometres south-west of Barcelona. According to Spain’s Ministry of the Interior, he was living in a house in what police described as an upmarket neighbourhood. Officers placed the property under surveillance for several days and were able to view the suspect in the garden, but police said he did not venture beyond the grounds, apparently aware that Swedish authorities were pursuing him.

Investigators believed there was a possibility of finding firearms or explosives inside. Therefore entry and a search of the property were consequently authorised under a European Investigation Order, and officers arrested the man during the early hours of Saturday August 1. Authorities have not said whether any weapons or explosives were ultimately recovered from the house.

🚩 Detenido en #Sitges uno de los fugitivos más buscados de #Suecia

🔹 Presuntamente participó en 20 hechos criminales de extrema violencia para desestabilizar a grupos criminales rivales

🔹 Adiestraba a jóvenes reclutados para ejecutar ataques, entrenándolos en el uso de armas… pic.twitter.com/6mwVcQUrzj

— Policía Nacional (@policia) August 3, 2026

Why the Swedish media name Emin Muqa Kulic

Neither the Spanish nor Swedish authorities named the arrested man in their initial official statements. However, Swedish broadcasters SVT and TV4 have identified him as Emin Muqa Kulic, aged 21. Kulic had also appeared on the Europol-hosted EU Most Wanted website, where he was publicly listed as wanted by Sweden for attempted murder.

SVT describes Kulic as a senior figure in Stockholm’s Dalen network. The broadcaster says police have previously portrayed him as the alleged right-hand man of Mikael “Greken” Tenezos, another suspected senior network figure who was arrested in Mexico in October 2025.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority confirmed that the arrested 21-year-old had been detained in absentia since May 2025 on suspicion of offences including complicity in murder and attempted murder. The suspected crimes were committed during 2024, and several investigations remain under way. “We believe the man has been one of those directing young people to commit serious violent crimes in Sweden,” lead prosecutor Ida Arnell said in the official statement. 

Police allege young recruits were given weapons and explosives

Spanish investigators place the suspect’s alleged activities within a much broader campaign of violence. They claim he participated in approximately 20 extremely violent criminal incidents during 2024, including attacks in which members of rival criminal groups were killed. The alleged purpose was to destabilise competing groups and provoke further conflicts between them. According to the Spanish account, those involved used military-style weapons, long and short firearms and explosives. Investigators also accuse the suspect of training young people recruited to carry out organised attacks. Police allege that he instructed them in the use of firearms and explosives and supplied the equipment himself.

The figure of 20 incidents comes from Spanish police and is broader than the suspected offences specified publicly by Swedish prosecutors. There are not yet 20 proven crimes or convictions against Kulic.

Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention has documented how recruitment into criminal networks can begin at an early age, and its wider research found that recruiters were commonly aged between 15 and 20, while those targeted were often between 12 and 15. In some cases, recruitment developed in less than a day.

The villa’s reported connection to Jonas Falk

One of the most unusual parts of the arrest concerns the house itself. SVT reports, citing its own sources, that the Sitges property had previously been occupied by Jonas Falk, one of Sweden’s most widely known convicted criminals. Kulic allegedly remained there for an extended period after Falk was arrested. Spanish police, however, have not confirmed that account in full. Their statement says only that the fugitive was “closely linked” to the person known as the “Pablo Escobar of Sweden”. It does not yet identify Falk or establish who legally owned or rented the property.

The claimed connection emerged just days after Stockholm District Court convicted Falk of four exceptionally serious narcotics offences. On July 28, he received a sentence of nine years and two months over the handling of approximately 2.3 tonnes of cocaine between South America and Europe. His lawyer has said the conviction will be appealed.

Spain must now decide on Sweden’s request

Spain has repeatedly surfaced in Sweden’s hunt for wanted suspects. Swedish Police figures show that 31 Swedish fugitives had been arrested in Spain by July 9 this year. 

Across all countries, 165 people had been arrested on Swedish alerts during the same period, compared with 139 a year earlier. Swedish prosecutors have now issued a European Arrest Warrant requesting Kulic’s surrender. This is a judicial procedure between European Union countries, rather than a conventional diplomatic extradition process. A surrender decision should normally be reached within ten days if the arrested person consents or within 60 days if the request is contested. No hearing date, decision or confirmed timetable for Kulic’s transfer to Sweden has yet been announced.

“Look, those two buildings were owned by slave traders,” the historian Martín Rodrigo Alharilla, 57, says offhand while walking through Barcelona’s port area. He continues the route along La Rambla and points out a bas-relief showing chains, ropes, sugar canes and a chimney. The building that displays it on its frontispiece houses the Generalitat’s Department of Culture. “It was built at the end of the 18th century and later bought by Tomás Ribalta i Serra, an indiano (a Spaniard who emigrated to the Americas) with business in Cuba who likely ran a slave-trading factory in what is now Nigeria. An extremely wealthy man who spent his time here living off his income,” the professor explains; he curated the exhibition La infamia, la participación catalana en la esclavitud colonial (The Infamy: Catalonia’s Role in Colonial Slavery), which was shown at the city’s Maritime Museum and is now available online for consultation.

On his tour he passes a plinth, now missing the sculpture of Antonio López y López, the marquis of Comillas: “The only statue in all of Spain to have been removed because the figure depicted was a slave trader.” He turns the corner by the former home of another trafficker who organized two brigantine slave voyages to the Americas. “Pedro Gil Babot lived here; he was a founder of the old Catalan Gas Lighting Company, today Naturgy. Three of the seven founders of that company were slaveholders,” he says. Step by step he maps the city with countless surnames, dates, figures and marriages that, according to his research, generated fortunes in Catalonia and Spain at the cost of the freedom, suffering, and forced labor of thousands of Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Two years ago he launched the project España Esclavista (Slave-owning Spain), a website on which he says he and a team have geolocated 220 tangible sites of this past — sites barely covered in textbooks but that shaped the future of the country and the African continent. That initiative was also selected for the Western Europe map on colonial memory shown in the House of European History’s exhibition Postcolonial? in Brussels.

“Today there are migrants who currently have fewer opportunities, but it must be understood that Western wealth is largely explained by slavery and colonialism. They are extractive activities. Capitalism in many territories developed through slavery,” he says at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona after explaining the exhibition. He notes that no politician from any party attended the opening, though he welcomes that the Barcelona provincial council took the initiative to promote it. “What matters is opening the debate. Work like this feeds reflection and invites people to think that social differences were built on this past. And what remains now is racism and inequality.”

This March the UN adopted a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized enslavement of Africans as “the most serious crime against humanity” in history, involving millions of victims over a period of 400 years. The text was backed by 123 countries, but those in the European Union abstained, and the U.S., Israel, and Argentina voted against it. “It is a carefully worked resolution and speaks of restorative justice, restitution, imprescriptibility, guarantees of non-repetition, compensation… That may explain why Spain and other slaveholding powers abstained. They may be afraid of facing these kinds of claims,” he says.

Although the text is not binding, Rodrigo sees this document as necessary and believes it could have legal implications. “It is another step toward seeking validation of this shameful past,” the professor explains. He describes the plantations where thousands upon thousands of enslaved Africans were forced to work in Cuba — amid the tropical heat, the smoke from the chimneys, and the physical strain — as “hell.” “Imagine what it must have been like. Moreover, one of the harshest realities is that most of them were men, so there was hardly any population growth. This was more like genocide. They would die, and more would be brought in from Africa,” explains Rodrigo, standing before a canvas that recreates these plantations, which enabled their owners to amass immense wealth.

In his research, he finds a legacy that is still palpable today: the acquisitions of urban expansion projects, buildings, and theaters; the founding of banks and lending institutions; annuities, inheritances… “The best-known slaveholding families in Catalonia, such as the marquis of Comillas’s, Joan Güell’s, Vidal-Quadras’s or Miquel Biada’s, are just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. He admits a personal determination to bring many more surnames to light. “But it’s not about pointing fingers at people; it’s because one must understand that slavery was an entire structure that moved huge wealth,” he says.

And indeed, the recent Maritime Museum exhibition listed long rolls of names identified as captains who commanded slave ships to the Americas, shipowners who organized human-trafficking expeditions, and many others involved. “Catalan traffickers who owned or managed factories on the African coast included José de Bérriz, Francesc Canela, Pau Freixas Ribalta, Pere Manegat, Domènech Mustich, Pere Sala, Francest Riera, Cristòfol Roig Vidal and Bonaventura Vidal Calzada,” one of the exhibition labels reads.

Although the practice was sanctioned by law, in Cuba it ceased to be considered legitimate de facto in 1886. “But the activity continued for some time with a degree of impunity,” Rodrigo says. He illustrates this conduct in the recent book La bisabuelita. Género, esclavitud y finanzas entre Cuba y Barcelona (The Great-Great-Grandmother: Gender, Slavery, and Finance Between Cuba and Barcelona), written with Lisa Surwillo, a professor of Iberian literature at Stanford. The research is based on the unpublished manuscript of Mercedes Llopart Xiqués, who recounts the life of her mother, Manuela Xiqués Romagosa, married to Roque Llopart Asúa. The book narrates that this Catalan organized slave-trading expeditions in the 19th century and amassed a fortune with which his wife later bought properties in the city. “It has been exceptional that I could obtain that first-hand family material. Normally I have no connection with slaveholding dynasties. They usually do not want to talk,” Rodrigo stresses. “I wouldn’t say they try to hide it, but it’s an uncomfortable subject. The response is to try to keep it unknown. Clearly responsibility is individual, but status and opportunities are inherited,” he says.

The Pompeu Fabra University professor regrets that Spain has not in some measure acknowledged this past the way the Netherlands did — whose government apologized in 2022 for enslaving peoples — or the French parliament, which in 2001 recognized slavery and the trafficking of Black people as a “crime against humanity” in the law known as Taubira. “Besides including it in the compulsory curriculum, one could start with symbolic reparations. And with acknowledgement of responsibility by banks or entities that had direct ties to slavery,” he suggests. He proposes funding for scholarships, measures that favor social inclusion and support for racialized people. “There should be financed study programs, exhibitions, debates… I am an activist for the truth, that this uncomfortable and painful truth be known and that it encourages reflection,” he concludes.

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