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An Indiana judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a relative of famed 1930s gangster John Dillinger seeking to dig up his body to confirm it is actually him. In a tan-walled Marion County courtroom, Superior Court Judge Timothy Oakes entertained arguments from the Crown Hill Cemetery, where Dillinger’s body is buried, which claimed that it has a right under state law to deny the exhumation of any body. The fight over digging up Dillinger’s remains came after the gangster’s nephew Michael Thompson filed a lawsuit in August claiming the cemetery is wrongfully preventing him from exhuming the body...

Spain's Supreme Court has ruled that the remains of dictator Francisco Franco should be exhumed. It backed the Socialist government's plan to move the remains from a state mausoleum to a less controversial site. An appeal by Franco's family against the exhumation and proposing an alternative site was rejected. The issue has divided opinion in Spain, which remains haunted by the Franco era. He won the 1930s civil war and went on to rule Spain until 1975.

Spain’s congress has voted in favor of digging up dictator Francisco Franco and removing his remains from the controversial Valley of the Fallen monument. The non-binding resolution passed on Thursday proposes that the vast basilica, topped by a 150-meter-high granite cross, be transformed into a place of “reflection and reconciliation” rather than a monument to fascism. The vote was passed after 198 MPs voted in favor of the motion presented by Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE), one voted against and 140 abstained. […] The motion attempts to kick start the Historical Memory Law of 2007, which has effectively been ignored since...

Spain may dig up the remains of late Fascist dictator Francisco Franco to move them from a sprawling mausoleum to a cemetery, according to a local news report. A commission of experts hired by the Spanish government is reviewing options on how to deal with the Valley of the Fallen, the burial place near Madrid where Franco is buried and is a controversial pilgrimage destination for Fascist sympathizers. Franco died in 1975 after emerging as the victor in the three-year Spanish Civil War which ended in 1939. The Valley of the Fallen holds the remains of more than 30,000 people....

Taking the country by surprise, forensic scientists on Wednesday exhumed what are believed to be the bodies of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena at the request of their children. Ceausescu ruled Romania for 25 years with an iron fist before being ousted and executed during the 1989 anti-communist revolt in which more than 1,000 people were killed. Some Romanians doubt that the Ceausescus were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest. There is also some nostalgia for the communist period and regrets that the couple was executed on Christmas Day, 1989. The news of...

To prove that it exists no contaminationThe Forensic Experts Entrusted with the Analyses of the Samples of Explosives of 3/11 Will Ask for the Exhumation of the Corpses.The hypothesis about the contamination of the explosives [samples] have been falling apart. When DNT was found in the samples, the official experts affirmed it was caused by an inoculation in its manufacturing process. This theory was discarded, but when nitro glycerine appeared in one of the explosion scenes, the chief of the Laboratory of the Scientific Police pointed out as cause the “porosity” of the bag that contained the sample. According to...

...Shortly after midnight on July 16, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reached back in time. He presided at the exhumation of the remains of Simón Bolívar -- Latin America's greatest independence hero, who helped liberate the region from Spain in the 19th century, and the object of Chávez's personal and political obsession.... By presidential decree, every television station in Venezuela showed images of Bolívar in historic paintings, then images of the skeleton, and then images of Chávez, with the national anthem blaring. The message of this macabre parody was unmistakable: Chávez is not a follower of Bolívar -- Chávez is Bolívar,...

THE grandson of Benito Mussolini has lodged a legal request to exhume the body of Italy's fascist dictator to find out how "Il Duce" really died, his lawyer said. World War 2 resistance accounts say Mussolini was executed by a partisan fighter "in the name of the Italian people" after he was captured in April 1945 while fleeing Allied forces with his mistress. "All lies," said Luciano Randazzo, Guido Mussolini's lawyer. "The real story is not what they told you ... absolutely not." The accounts name the executioner as the late Walter Audisio, also know by his war name "Colonel...

A couple have been given permission to exhume the body of their stillborn baby after a four-year campaign of vandalism against his grave Yobs targeting Cameron Adams's burial place at Newark cemetery, near Nottingham, have destroyed tributes, ruined flowers and stolen soft toys. One even left a letter for his parents, David and Karen, claiming that because their son was stillborn he should be buried in an unmarked grave. Mr and Mrs Adams, from Newark, were so distressed that they applied for a licence to remove Cameron from his grave. Mrs Adams, 40, said she would cremate Cameron's body "because...