Spain’s National Court on Friday suspended the opening of dozens of mass graves dating from the 1936 to 1939 civil war and General Francisco Franco’s ensuing 36-year dictatorship.
The court accepted a complaint by prosecutors trying to block the orders issued by Baltasar Garzon, a judge at the same court.
Garzon has launched Spain’s first judicial investigation into the fate of Franco opponents killed in acts of repression during the war, which was unleashed by Franco’s uprising against the republican government and the dictatorship.
Garzon ordered the exhumation of bodies from the country’s most controversial monument, the underground basilica and mausoleum known as the Valley of the Fallen.
Eight corpses that lie inside the warren of niches at the mausoleum northwest of Madrid should be exhumed, Garzon said.
The bones of some 40,000 people who died during the Spanish civil war were deposited there after Franco’s favorite monument, topped by a 150m high granite cross, was finished in 1958.
Relatives of the eight men said their corpses had originally been thrown into a well near their home village of Pajares de Adaja, in central Spain, by members of a Francoist death squad in 1936. More than 20 years later their bones were taken to the Valley of the Fallen.
“We are going to recover my father, my uncle and six others who were executed,” said Fausto Canales, 74.
Canales said Franco had “stolen” the bones of his father, Valerico, and his uncle Fidel to ensure that some Republican enemies were buried alongside his supporters at the Valley of the Fallen.
Judge Garzon has ordered the opening of 19 other Franco-era mass graves, though state attorneys on Friday asked for those exhumations to be suspended until a higher court decided whether he had overstepped his powers.
Campaigners said the judge’s order opened the way for the removal of thousands more bodies from a basilica built over 18 years with the help of forced labour battalions of political prisoners.
Most bodies were placed in niches hidden behind the walls. Only Franco himself and the leader of the extreme right-wing Falange party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, have graves inside the basilica.
Hundreds of Franco supporters come here for a special mass every year on the anniversary of his death in 1975.
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