Investigation to find Lorca's grave gives hope to relatives looking for the victims of Franco

Efforts to rescue Franco's civil war victims from the anonymity of common graves advanced at the weekend when the mayor of Alfacar, near Granada, said he would seek to excavate the spot where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot and buried in August 1936.

A growing band of relatives of Franco's "disappeared" are taking testimonies from witnesses and digging up scores of mass graves throughout Spain. Lorca, reckoned by the biographer Ian Gibson to be Spain's finest, best-loved poet, is the most illustrious of perhaps tens of thousands of Franco's Republican opponents whose bodies have never been recovered.

Only now, after more than 60 years, those still alive and who can still remember how victims were taken for a pre-dawn paseo, or stroll, before being shot and tossed in a ditch, are overcoming their terror and speaking out.

Lorca's death and exact resting place have always been matters of controversy, and the poet's descendants declined to help previous investigations. But grandchildren of three victims buried alongside Lorca - a teacher, Dioscoro Galindo, and two anarchist bullfighters - have asked for the site at Viznar, near Granada, to be dug up. Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the poet's nephew, said that he could not stand in their way.

Mayor Juan Caballero said permission would be granted for three sites to be investigated with metal detectors and electromagnetic radars. Two experts from Granada University, who worked on exhumations of desaparecidos in Chile and Argentina, said that they thought the bodies should not be difficult to identify.

For Mr Gibson, this step marks a breakthrough. "The gravedigger took me to the site in 1966 and told me he had buried Lorca with lots of bodies piled on top of each other. He remembered the teacher because he had only one leg, and I located the family. He was terrified. You couldn't go poking around in those days, you would be arrested," Mr Gibson told The Independent yesterday. "Spain owes it to Lorca to find his body, to remove the doubts surrounding his death and to honour him properly."

Victims' relatives in the Movement to Recover Historical Memory face a wall of indifference from officials. They say they want only to give victims a decent burial. But the official view is that such efforts revive resentments best forgotten. Ana Botella, a Madrid councillor and the wife of the Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, said recently: "It isn't worth wasting our energies on digging up the past."

Lorca is particularly controversial because he was internationally renowned. He was a Republican opposed to Franco, and a homosexual - leading Mr Gibson to suspect he may have been tortured. "Uncovering his remains would clarify exactly where and how he was shot, and whether he suffered torture during the night or two he was detained before they killed him," Mr Gibson said.

An exhibition in Madrid marking Lorca's centenary in 1998 did not mention the poet's sexuality, and attributed his death - recorded in a 1940 certificate faked after Franco's victory - to "war wounds".