The investigators will try to identify the remains and return them to relatives so that they can be formally buried
Bodies of 53 prisoners from 1941, were exhumed by Forensic archaeologists as a part of an initiative by the Basque government that aims to search for missing people from the Spanish Civil War. According to a report by Reuters on Monday, December 12, the bodies were recovered from a shallow grave in the Basque town of Orduna.
A statement regarding the graves by the Basque regional government said, “The historical documentation on the graves and testimony suggest that the human remains belong to prisoners who died between February and June 1941 at the Central Prison of Orduna”.
The initiative to exhume the bodies from the Civil War era is meant to be a part of the healing process for the country from the wounds inflicted by Franco´s dictatorship era. “The investigators will try to identify the remains and return them to relatives so that they can be formally buried”, said, Francisco Etxeberria, Spanish pathologist, according to a quote cited in the report.
This initiative was possible after a bill was approved by the leftist coalition Spanish government in 2020 to finance the process of exhuming the bodies from unmarked graves. The actions are also being taken as “part of a wider effort to find out the truth about the dictatorship’s crimes and heal wounds still open four decades after Franco’s death”, the report said.
After the remains are gathered by forensics experts, they will be sent to laboratories for DNA testing. Once the results are out, the remains will be sent to the relatives of the person, if they are identified.
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