Forensic archaeologists in eastern Spain have unearthed the remains of some of the 100 people believed to have been executed by the Franco regime near Valencia 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.

According to one family's account, 100 sympathisers of the fallen republican regime were buried just as the dictatorship cemented its authoritarian grip.


Image: General Franco ruled Spain until 1975

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.

Image: Countrywide mass graves are believed to hold at least 114,000 victims

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".

Image: Forensic experts unearthed four fractured skulls

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 half a million 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.