Ex-Spanish dictator to be exhumed
THE Spanish Supreme Court said a caretaker Socialist government can exhume the remains of former dictator General Francisco Franco from the mausoleum he built on the outskirts of Madrid.
Six judges rejected an appeal by Franco’s relatives against the plan to move the body to a cemetery just outside the capital.
Leftist parties and families of many Spanish Civil War victims have wanted Franco, who died in 1975, to be removed from the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum, a major tourist attraction.
Franco’s family had hoped to block the exhumation or have the body reburied in central Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral.
Caretaker prime minister Pedro Sanchez celebrated in a tweet: “The determination to make up for the suffering of the victims of Francoism has always guided the government’s action.”