AKIPRESS.COM - 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, Sky News reports.

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.

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.