Spain exhumes body of general linked to Garcia Lorca's execution

FILE PHOTO: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez walks past a wall with the names of people killed by late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's forces during the Civil War, as he visits the exhumation work of a mass grave at El Carmen cemetery in Valladolid, Spain, October 24, 2022. Moncloa Palace/Fernando Calvo/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

Spain exhumed on Thursday the body of a Francoist general who is believed to have ordered the execution of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca in 1936 at the start of the Spanish civil war.

Church authorities, acting on orders from the leftist government, removed the body of Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who commanded the Nationalists' Southern Army in 1936-37, from the Macarena basilica in Seville in the early hours of Thursday.