IT HAS been one of Spain’s most enduring mysteries — who killed the country’s most celebrated poet and playwright, and where is he buried?

On the 70th anniversary of his murder, a new film will claim that Federico García Lorca’s death was brought about by jealous members of his own family, wealthy landowners in Granada. Though the filmmakers are careful not to give too much away before the September screening, they claim that Horacio and Miguel Roldán, cousins of García Lorca, were behind his killing.

According to new evidence, the two helped to organise the fascist death squads that roamed the area in the first blood-soaked weeks of the Spanish Civil War.

García Lorca was hauled out and shot after being denounced as a Republican, a Communist and a homosexual. He became a martyr to the Republican Left, ultimately defeated in the war. But the film-makers say that the true roots of his death lay in the petty rivalries built up over generations between the poet’s family and other relations: the Roldáns and the Albas.

Word of García Lorca’s masterpiece The House of Bernarda Alba, completed shortly before his death, had apparently enraged his relatives. They saw his tale of a tyrannical Andalusian matriarch as a slight against them. Others were thought to be resentful of García Lorca’s fame. “The death [of García Lorca] originated in the heart of the family itself,” Emilio Ruiz Barrachina, who directed the documentary, said.

There was a political component; García Lorca’s family backed the Republican Government, while the Albas and Roldáns supported Franco’s military coup. But the film-makers say that García Lorca’s homosexuality, long ignored even by admirers on the Left, made him a target of the death squads.

The local man who allegedly killed him, Juan Luis Trescastro Medina, reportedly shouted in a bar that night: “I put two bullets in his arse for being a homo!” The programme makers say that his assassin was a distant relative.

García Lorca’s death has long been a contentious subject in Spain. The subject was taboo during the 36-year dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who banned his works. Since Franco’s death in 1975, there have been sporadic attempts to find out more about what happened, and even to locate the playwright’s body to give it a proper burial.

His family have been implacably opposed to digging up his remains, thought to be buried among olive groves close to Granada. “We are not going to discover new facts whose importance justifies the violence of disinterring the dead,” the poet’s niece, Laura García Lorca, has said.

However, the relatives of two anarchist bullfighters and a teacher, thought to be buried with García Lorca, want to identify their graves. Others say that finding someone of García Lorca’s stature would help to focus attention on the estimated 30,000 other victims of Franco’s Nationalist forces, who lie in 800 mass graves around Spain. And some believe that Spain’s more enduring literary mystery simply must be solved.

“Around the world there are millions of people who love Lorca — myself among them — and they want to know where he is buried,” Ian Gibson, who has written a biography of the poet and participated in the film, said. “I cannot understand the family’s attitude.”

However, García Lorca’s family did co-operate with the film-makers, granting researchers authority to delve into local archives.

More than half a million people are thought to have been killed during the three-year civil war, which split towns and families across Spain. Although the Nationalist dead were exhumed and given proper burials during Franco’s rule, Republican victims have lain in unmarked mass graves for seven decades.

Conservatives oppose efforts to open the graves, saying that it would stir old resentments. But the Socialist Government is determined to press ahead with the “recovery of historical memory” from the country’s darkest period. It plans to introduce a law tomorrow honouring Franco’s victims.

Times Recommends

• LA profits from Michael Jackson stimulus
• Berlusconi's absent wife causes G8 headache
• Chimps that took a punishing step for Man