The Prosecutor's Office of the Provincial Court of Granada is investigating as possible crimes against humanity the shooting of 49 people whose remains have been found in seven mass graves in Víznar (Granada), in a place near the place where the poet Federico García Lorca was murdered. Sources from the Prosecutor's Office unit specialized in Human Rights and Democratic Memory, directed by Dolores Delgado, explain to EL PAÍS that a couple of months ago the professor at the University of Granada Francisco Carrión, in charge since 2021 of coordinating the work of search for victims of the Civil War in the area, sent them documentation about the discovery of bodies with obvious signs of violent death in various mass graves. This specialized unit does not have jurisdictional functions, but it can urge, as in this case, the provincial prosecutor's offices to investigate. The classification of possible crimes against humanity has already been determined at the Granada headquarters of the prosecutor's office. After the first report, Carrión later added information about 13 other people who, for now, have not been included in the investigation. Last week, archaeologists found, in one of the exhumed graves, the remains of a shot child. He was between 11 and 14 years old, according to experts, and had 14 other bodies on him. At the moment, his identity is unknown. The Prosecutor's Office is awaiting the latest forensic reports to incorporate the new findings into the investigation.
Based on the reports already received, which the Public Prosecutor's Office considers “rigorous and very complete”, the Granada provincial prosecutor's office has made a first classification, which defines the facts as possible “crimes of homicide, murder, illegal detention and/or disappearance force committed in the context of crimes against humanity”, as can be read in the decree initiating this investigation signed by a Granada prosecutor. The investigation, which began on April 12, is in a pre-trial phase consisting of the compilation, by the prosecution, of all existing forensic, scientific or documentary data on those graves, the people buried there and the circumstances of his death. From there, the prosecution will determine how to continue.
Since 2021, the remains of 124 people, 34 of them women, have been found in 17 different graves in the Víznar ravine. According to the reports provided so far, the victims were wearing “clothes compatible with the first half of the 20th century”, showed “signs of violent death” and were buried clandestinely.
In the specialized unit of the Prosecutor's Office they recognize that it is likely that in the Víznar case it will not be possible to find the culprits and they clarify: “Our objective is much more than that. It is finding truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.” The idea is that justice can provide the relatives of those murdered with all the information related to the crimes, regardless of whether or not the guilty parties can be prosecuted. The section of the democratic memory law dedicated to the specialized court prosecutor seeks, precisely, that the death of the executioners does not prevent the descendants of those retaliated from having access to an official investigation into what happened.
This is not the first time that the Prosecutor's Office upholds the criterion of the obligation to investigate, in application of article 29.1 of the Democratic Memory Law. The norm, approved in 2022, favors an integrative interpretation with a human rights approach, in accordance with article 10.2 of the Constitution and various international treaties and conventions, for the admission of complaints and appeal against orders of inadmissibility of cases of this type. But this is the first time that it has initiated investigative proceedings, since in the case of Víznar the events had not previously been prosecuted.
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