Forensic archaeologists in Spain have unearthed the remains of some 100 people near Valencia, believed to have been executed by the Franco regime at the end of Spain's Civil War eight decades ago.
Independent forensic experts unearthed four fractured skulls amid a mass of bones and decaying clothes.
It is the latest among many similar efforts led in the past decade by relatives of at least 114,000 or so victims of the civil war, and the four decades of Francoism that endured subsequently.
Their deaths were never officially investigated.
An anthropologist volunteer cleans and classifies bones of victim following an exhumation of a mass grave at the cemetery of Paterna, near Valencia in Spain | Image: Emilio Morenatti/AP/Press Association Images
According to one family's account, 100 sympathisers of the fallen republican regime were buried just as the dictatorship cemented its authoritarian grip.
A recent government-led initiative to exhume Franco from a controversial shrine glorifying him by the end of the year has focused the country's attention on how to open the anonymous mass graves in cemeteries and in unmarked ditches along rural roads across the country.
The remains of all those killed in the war are believed to have been thrown into different mass graves and covered in quicklime.
On Tuesday, graveyard number 112 where two batches of 50 prisoners were inhumed months after the war ended in April 1939 was the latest to be opened in Paterna - a town on the outskirts of coastal Valencia.
After days of careful digging underneath a layer of ordinary, casket-burials, piles of skeletons emerged.
Alex Calpe, one of the independent archaeologists working at the site on behalf of relatives of those killed, says the experts' work must be "thorough" because its goal is "to deliver closure to the victims' families".
A volunteer uses a brush to clean the bones of a victim before an exhumation inside a mass grave at the cemetery of Paterna, near Valencia in Spain | Image: Emilio Morenatti/AP/Press Association Images
However, the task ahead remains daunting.
Countrywide mass graves are believed to hold at least 114,000 victims of the Spanish Civil War in which 500,000 people are believed to have died on all sides and the four decades of Francoism that followed.
Exhumation efforts began in 2007 with a new Historic Memory Law that condemned atrocities committed during Franco's regime, which lasted until 1975.
But the law fell short, leaving it up to local and regional governments to fund exhumations and DNA tests which were often paid for by relatives through crowd-funding.
The previous conservative administration declined to allocate any budget.
