ARCHIVED - Elche to exhume and identify victims of Franco regime

14 victims shot in 1939 believed to be in mass grave at the Old Cemetery in the Baix Vinalopo, Alicante province.

Elche Council has received a grant of more than €32,600 for the exhumation and identification of victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, buried in a mass grave at the municipality's Cementerio Viejo (Old Cemetery).

As many as 14 "missing people" are believed to have been shot between July and October 1939, after the Civil War had ended on April 1, and their unidentified bodies buried in a "mass pit".

The town hall applied for a grant from the Valencian regional government to carry out the "extensive investigation", and received 82 per cent of the amount requested.

"The subsidised project proposes the investigation, location, delimitation, exhumation, identification and an initial anthropological study of the victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship buried in the municipal cemetery of Elche, specifically in the area where the cistern-pit of those who retaliated against the Franco dictatorship is located," explains the local authority.

It's here that more than a dozen residents of Elche, Aspe and Crevillente, who were shot by sentence of Franco's court martial, are believed to have been "deposited".

The aim is "to carry out criminological investigations" to establish the exact cause of death and identify the remains so that, "if possible, they can be returned to their relatives".

The work will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team made up of archaeologists, anthropologists and researchers from the Forensic Laboratory of the Autonomous University of Madrid, with the support of the municipal archaeologist.

Elche is one of a number of Valencian municipalities that are complying with the provisions of Law 14/2017 on democratic memory in the exhumations of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship.

IMAGE: Ayuntamiento de Elche