Spain launches bid to identify victims of civil war, Gen. Franco

A person walks by the Franco family burial space adorned with flowers in the Almudena Crypt, a cavernous late-19th century Catholic temple under Madrid’s Almudena cathedral, in central Madrid, Spain, Thursday Oct. 25, 2018. Hundreds of protesters in Madrid have urged government and Catholic church authorities to prevent the remains of the country’s 20th century dictator from ending in the city’s cathedral. Spain’s center-left government has promised to exhume this year Gen. Francisco Franco from a glorifying mausoleum, but the late dictator’s heirs have defied the plans by proposing for his remains to be relocated to a family crypt under the cathedral. (AP Photo/Paul White)

MADRID — Spanish authorities are inviting people to send by email any details they have about officially unrecorded victims of the country’s 1936-39 Civil War and the four decades of dictatorship that followed under Gen. Francisco Franco.

The Justice Ministry announced Wednesday that the move aims to help create a reliable census of anonymous burials in unmarked ditches across the country.

The socialist government, which faces a general election next month, wants to unearth and identify the estimated 114,000 victims of the civil war and the rule of Franco, who died in 1975.

Three United Nations-sponsored missions to Spain since 2013 have criticized authorities for lacking a plan to search for missing people.

A recent expert report said that, realistically, only around a quarter of the estimated victims could be identified and recovered. /kga