The remains of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and others buried in mass graves during the Civil War are to be exhumed as part of an investigation into mass killings, a judge has ordered.

Judge Baltasar Garzon authorized the opening of the graves containing remains of the victims of General Franco’s victims all over Spain, including one where Lorca is thought to lie in Viznar near Granada.

Lorca was shot dead for being a leftist and homosexual in August 1936, one month after Franco’s uprising against the Republican government sparked the civil war.

The families of two people who were executed and their bodies dumped with Lorca have sought the opening of the grave to give the victims dignified burials.

For years, the Lorca family opposed the opening of the grave but recently said it had no objections.

Judge Garzon ordered the creation of a group of experts to determine the exact location of the 19 mass graves and the number of people buried there.

He has pledged to identify those responsible for the killings, calling them “crimes against humanity”.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain introduced an amnesty law and maintained a ‘pact of forgetting’ about atrocities committed by the Nationalist and Republican forces during the Civil War.

But last year, Spain’s Socialist Government passed the controversial Law of Historic Memory.

The law sought to offer some justice to Franco’s victims by granting them official recognition, by removing Francoist monuments, and pledges some support to associations that have dug up the remains of some 4,000 people from mass graves.

In 1988 Judge Garzon gained international attention when he attempted to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

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