Spain lays 28 civil war dead to rest

Relatives of 28 people executed by pro-Franco forces in Spain’s civil war laid them properly to rest Saturday, 76 years after they were shot and thrown in a mass grave.

Associations for victims of the people executed in the village of Cortes de la Frontera in Andalucia, southern Spain, had exhumed them from a mass grave and on Saturday laid their remains in boxes in a newly built cemetery.

They said the 21 men and seven women were shot dead by the forces of Francisco Franco, who went on to defeat the Republican side in the 1936-1939 war and set up a dictatorship in Spain.

They were the first bodies to be dug up from what are said to be hundreds of people tortured and executed on the El Marrufo estate, where campaigners say hundreds of families had fled as Franco’s troops advanced.

“It is not just about giving a proper tomb to the 28 people whose remains we recovered,” said Andres Rebolledo, president of an association representing local families of those killed by Franco’s side.

“It is also an act of recognition of their struggle and of the democratic values for which they fought and died,” he said, in a statement.

“They are 28 people, but they symbolise all the victims of the Francoist terror in Andalusia.”

Campaigners say about 114,000 bodies of people killed during the civil war and Franco’s ensuing four-decade rule are thought to lie unidentified in mass graves around Spain.