Almagro Mass Grave

 From the BBC:

“Spanish Civil War victims recovered by Cranfield University experts”

Forensic archaeologists have started to recover the bodies of victims executed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Experts from Cranfield University in Bedfordshire are searching alongside Spanish partners for 26 people buried between 1939 and 1940. They were buried in the civil cemetery at Almagro, south of Madrid. Some victims' families have been traced so the bodies can be returned for a "dignified burial". The Cranfield team is working with fellow archaeologists and anthropologists from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and social anthropologists from Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) to search for, exhume and then identify those executed. It is one of a number of recoveries from the 1936 to 1939 conflict currently being investigated. Since 2000, more than 7,000 victims have been recovered. Dr Nicholas Márquez-Grant, senior lecturer in forensic anthropology at Cranfield Forensic Institute (CFI), said the victims were executed for their "political ideologies or sometimes out of envy". Some bodies already exhumed showed evidence of gunshot wounds to the head.

"Recovery of the bodies is carried out layer by layer and is only the start of the process to identify and bring dignity to the deceased and help to provide closure and peace to their families," Dr Márquez-Grant said. In order to trace remains back to surviving relatives, DNA will be taken from the bones. "Not everybody will be identified," Dr Márquez-Grant said. "But those that are will be returned to their families with their objects. Those we are unable to identify will be buried in a dignified burial in a proper cemetery." José Barrios, whose great uncle - also named José Barrios - was executed and buried at the site, said: "When the excavation started I did not feel much but when they found the first body, I saw the skull and the feet of an individual, I thought 'We are here now - we are coming to find you.'"

^ Sadly, Spain has never dealt with Franco's Dictatorship (1936-1975) even when they find mass graves where the victims were murdered by Franco's people.

In 1975 they made the Pact of Forgetting to "pretend" the crimes of the past 39 years did not happen and in 1977 the Spanish Amnesty Law so that no victims could get closure and no Franco-era people could be brought to justice. Both are still in force today.

The only good thing Spain has done was remove Franco's body from his Shrine in 2019 (44 years after he died.) FYI: It took the Soviets 8 years to remove Stalin's body from Lenin's Mausoleum to a place with lesser significance. ^

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-57235312