Video appears to show man speeding along busy main road in Catalan city but officers say there is not much they can do

Police in Barcelona have been puzzled by a video appearing to show a man in a wheelchair tearing down one of the city’s main streets, weaving in and out of traffic and exhibiting a stunning contempt for his own safety and the highway code.

The footage, shot by a passenger on a motorbike and uploaded to YouTube four days ago, shows the man, wearing a blue shirt, hurtling along the bus lane of the Carrer de Muntaner before pulling out to overtake cars.

The grainy video has proved immensely popular online, with Facebook users suggesting the Spanish racing driver Fernando Alonso should trade in his McLaren for the unidentified man’s wheelchair.

The Catalan city’s police force said officers were aware of the incident but could not do much about it. A spokesman said: “We’ve only seen the video on YouTube. We didn’t see it as it happened and so we haven’t been able to do anything. The man in the wheelchair remains unidentified as it’s hard to identify someone in a wheelchair in a video. It isn’t like a car where you have a number plate.”

The spokesman did not rule out the possibility that the video could be a hoax or part of a PR stunt. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. “Sometimes these weird videos go viral and then it turns out that they’re part of an advertising campaign. You never know.”

He added: “The video is very odd, but from a policing point of view, if no damage was done and it was something ‘invisible’, then there’s not much we can do. The world does sometimes go mad.”