IT WAS a secret that the former Spanish soldier felt he could not take to the grave.

Sixty-three years after forming part of a firing squad that executed seven Republican resistance fighters, the old man sent an anonymous letter to his local mayor confessing his role in the summary justice of the Franco era.

He told how he was ordered to bury the seven — one a young teenager — in an unmarked grave in 1941. The letter enabled Emilio Valiente, mayor of Fontanosas, near Ciudad Real, to locate the grave and inform the dead men’s relatives.

Last weekend, amid emotional scenes, José Escribano watched as the remains of his brother, father and two uncles were dug up near the village. “At last I can finally feel some peace after a lifetime of pain,” he said. Florencia del Álamo, whose brother’s body also lay in the grave, said: “My mother died in 1988, without knowing why they were shot and where their were buried.”

The dead were identified by DNA samples. All had bullet holes in their heads. Hundreds of Spanish families have lived for decades without knowing what happened to relatives who disappeared during the civil war or the dictatorship of General Franco.

Bunches of flowers laid by roadsides are often thought to be for traffic accident victims, but are actually in memory of those who disappeared.

After the civil war, Franco ensured that thousands of his troops killed by Republicans were given proper burials. But Republican troops or resistance fighters were never accorded the same respect. Attitudes are gradually changing as Spain becomes more willing to confront the taboo subject of the civil war, and ageing participants talk about what they did.

Over the past five years volunteers have dug up the remains of 500 people in 67 mass graves. The hunt for the missing goes on amid increasing pressure on the Spanish Government to keep its promise to find justice for victims of the Franco era.

The government of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister, set up “the commission for the study of the situation of the victims of the civil war and Francoism” to examine each case. But though it promised to complete the task by the 30th anniversary of Franco’s death last year, it has been forced to admit that it will take years more.

“This is not a political question but a moral one,” said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. “We have received some small help from the Government but nothing more, while in Guatemala, Chile and Argentina the State has helped the victims of this injustice.”

One mystery remains about the mass grave of Fontanosas.Who was the anonymous former soldier who felt that he had to confess to what he called this “abominable” act? His type-written letter, simply postmarked Barcelona, gives no hints to his identity.

The relatives of those who died bear no grudge but simply want to thank him for allowing them to close this story.

CIVIL WAR

July 1936-April 1939

More than 350,000 Spaniards killed in the conflict, with about 145,000 killed in battle

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