Madrid accused of lying over remains of Franco victims

OFFICIALS in Madrid have been accused of lying about the cremation of 3,000 civilians, executed under the brutal regime of Francisco Franco, after heavy rains exposed a mass grave.

Recent storms swept away soil in an area of La Almudena public cemetery, exposing the bones of people executed on the orders of Francoist military courts in the five years after Spain’s civil war ended in 1939.

The finding contradicts a claim by the municipal funeral company which said the ossuary containing the remains of those killed during the military dictator’s post-war repression had been located and that the bones were cremated in the Nineties.

“It was a genuine surprise, because it had been thought that the ossuary was empty,” said Mauricio Valiente, the head of Madrid’s human rights and historical memory department.

A survey will be carried out to determine the dimensions of the grave and confirm that the dead are victims of fascist firing squads, he added.

“A determining factor will be the discovery of skulls with bullet wounds, indicating that they were shot at close range,” Francisco Etxeberria, Spain’s foremost forensic anthropologist, told the newspaper El País.

Among the 3,000 bodies known to have been buried in La Almudena cemetery are the “Thirteen Roses”, 13 young women who were executed in 1939 accused of anti-franco activism.

Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist government is also currently wrangling with a legal dispute over a demand to exhume and remove Franco’s remains from a monument on the edge of Madrid.