The first death caused by the war between the Huelva clans of the Salazar and the Moriña was Ramón Moriña, a tall and burly gypsy who fell dead to the ground after receiving a bullet in the chest on September 10, 2024. The two families were still related by the marriage of two of their members: Manuel, nicknamed El Baba, from the Salazar clan, and Saray, from the Moriña. The deceased was Saray’s brother and the alleged murderer – the case is still pending trial – was Saray’s husband, El Baba, who would have, therefore, killed his brother-in-law and thus started an eye for an eye that to this day would have already claimed five lives if confirmed, as the investigation suggests, that the three deaths in the coastal town of Isla Cristina (Huelva) last Sunday are also due to the enmity of the clans.
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The origin of the first bloodshed, Ramón’s death, was initially placed in problems in the marriage between Saray and El Baba. It was said that she could not stand the relationship, that she wanted to separate, but that he would not let her go, that she was a victim of gender violence.
A few weeks after the crime – October 22, 2024 – Saray herself recounted the details of the event on the Telecinco program TardeAR. She spoke from her family’s house, the Moriña’s, located in the El Torrejón neighborhood, in Huelva city, surrounded by no less than a dozen relatives. In the front row, sitting on the living room sofa facing the camera, were she, her mother, and a brother, Luis, who had survived the shooting but still had not had the bullet lodged in his jaw removed.
“It’s not that I was abused but that I was threatened, that he was going to kill my brothers if I left,” Saray explained. The version of events she offered denied that her brothers Luis and Ramón had gone to her house to ask El Baba for explanations about how he treated her and that this claim had unleashed her husband’s fury. “Luis was coming from picking up his little girl from school. In the end, the mother or grandmother took her, something like that happened. And he, instead of taking the way where this family lives, took my street downwards. Manuel was at the door and started shooting at his car,” she recounted.
Her brother Luis corroborated her version: “I passed by, saw him get up from a chair, there were him, the cousins, the uncle… I accelerated the car, went forward, and then I felt like the car flipped and then was the impact here,” he said, putting his hand behind his ear, where the bullet entry hole was.
Injured, after crashing the car, he managed to get out “dizzy, stunned” and walked until he met a cousin who rescued him and took him to the hospital. He said he was unaware that his brother Ramón, upon learning what had happened, had gone to El Baba‘s home and had found death there. “Then Ramón arrived, going up the stairs: ‘Manuel, what’s going on,’ and that’s when he shot him. That’s what happened,” Saray recounted how her husband had allegedly ended her brother’s life.
The alleged murderer, Saray told Ana Rosa, had just been released from prison, where he had been after being convicted of a crime committed five years earlier: he had stabbed two people. At that time Saray and El Baba worked at the Moriña grocery store, a business run by her brother Luis in the neighborhood. “Manuel had an altercation with our family and with his family, which is why he served time, because he stabbed a guy in the arm; another in the neck. And, through that, my brother told him: ‘Get out of here, you’re going to bring us ruin.’ And he kicked him out. He called threatening, insulting, many curses, saying he was going to kill my brother, that he should be ashamed, why the Moriñas didn’t stand up for a brother-in-law.”
Saray placed the moment when El Baba swore revenge on her family in that episode: “The grudge they have with my brother is mainly that: ‘You didn’t stand up for me.’ He, while in prison, said he was going to kill my brothers.”
The TardeAR program had a team at the Moriña house and another at the Salazar’s, also located in the Huelva neighborhood of El Torrejón. In this case, three women from the clan appeared before the camera. The program only identifies Aroa, cousin of El Baba, but it is understood that the other woman speaking is the mother of the alleged murderer, the same woman who last Sunday lay dead face up in front of her building’s entrance. The Moriñas had asked Ramón and demanded that the gypsy law be enforced, which says that the family of the one who pulls the trigger must go into exile.
El Baba‘s mother complained about the pressure the rival family was exerting to make them leave Huelva. “Luis Moriña is the one who has us death threatened. He gives me 24 hours to evacuate my entire block, where I live with all my children. If not, they’ll set us on fire… He fired two full magazines. One guy who was sitting next to my nephew got four shots from Luis Moriña and doesn’t report it out of fear because he has been death threatened,” the woman said.
Fire, shootings… In the six weeks between Ramón’s murder and this TV appearance, El Baba‘s building had been shot at on at least two occasions. The day before the interview, for example, “two people riding a motorcycle,” according to witnesses, fired a burst with a semi-automatic weapon at the facade. The National Police collected 30 bullet casings from the scene. The archives also show two fires at the end of October at the plaza de la Violeta number where El Baba‘s relatives lived. Both were arson, one even caused elements of the facade to fall off.
After Ramón Moriña’s death, two very different messages began circulating on the social networks of those close to the protagonists of the event. Some spread the image of the deceased, who was 46 years old and had three children, along with words of remembrance: “Huelva and its neighborhood are in mourning. Rest and watch over and give strength to your family. We will never forget you.” Others put a price on the alleged’s head: “This rat is wanted. The family offers a reward of 50,000 euros to anyone who provides truthful and verifiable information about his whereabouts. Maximum dissemination is requested. Absolutely nothing will be known about the informant. Maximum discretion. Contact through social networks or phone,” was spread along with a photo of El Baba and a description of his physical characteristics: “1.85, 39 years old, thick beard, black hair, strong build, arm tattoos.”
The police found him before any vendetta could take place. On October 12, 2024, one month and two days after the crime, El Baba was arrested at the other end of Spain, in Gijón, where he had taken refuge at a cousin’s house who lived in the El Cerillero neighborhood. Shortly after, his family left Huelva, as the gypsy law demanded, to settle just 50 kilometers away, in Isla Cristina.
There, in May 2025, agents from the Civil Guard’s Special Intervention Unit (UEI) had to act to arrest three close associates of El Baba who, armed, kept watch from rooftops for fear of reprisals and had intimidated the neighbors.
A month later, in June 2025, a man and his daughter were shot in their home on Huerto de la Potala street, in Isla Cristina, with the man dying and the young woman seriously injured. Several local media identified the deceased as El Baba‘s stepfather and the woman as the deceased’s daughter. The episode was again framed within the war between the Salazares and Moriñas.
Then came the silence. More than a year without news of violence between the clans until Sunday when images were released of El Baba‘s mother and sister – the latter eight months pregnant – dead at their doorstep alongside a minor who had nothing to do with the clan.
El Baba, for his part, is imprisoned in the Villabona penitentiary center, in Asturias, still awaiting trial for the death of Ramón Moriña.