Madrid  - A judicial move to investigate killings and disappearances during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco sparked controversy on Tuesday.

Associations representing Franco's victims and leftist parties welcomed the move as finally doing justice to thousands of victims, while conservative commentators said it reopened old wounds.

National Court judge Baltasar Garzon announced Monday that he was requesting information on deaths and disappearances during the war, which was sparked by Franco's uprising against the legal republican government, and during the dictatorship that lasted until Franco's death in 1975.

Garzon is seeking information on burials and disappearances from Spain's more than 20,000 parishes, several municipalities, several ministries and the Valley of the Fallen, Franco's huge mausoleum near Madrid, where civil war victims are also buried.

Garzon's ruling was described as the most important judicial move in Spain to clarify the fate of Franco's victims.

The judge said he wanted to determine whether the National Court was competent to investigate the complaints lodged by several associations representing victims.

Citizens' associations exhuming republican remains from mass graves estimate that about 30,000 people are buried in unmarked places all over the country.

More than 500,000 people were killed on both sides of the war, which became a prelude to the fight against Fascism in World War II, with the Soviet Union backing the republicans, while Germany and Italy sided with Franco's right-wing nationalists.

The Franco regime honoured its own dead, but it has never been officially clarified how many of his opponents were killed during and after the war.

The aim of Garzon's ruling was to press the state to identify the victims, the daily El Pais said in an editorial.

A 2007 law seeking to rehabilitate Franco's victims obliges the authorities to establish maps indicating the location of mass graves.

Yet only two among Spain's 17 semi-autonomous regions have done so, according to the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (ARMH), which has spearheaded the effort to give republicans honourable burials.

The law has also prompted the removal of Francoist monuments and symbols from several cities.

However, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government has been accused of half-heartedness because of the sensitivity of the issue.

A 1977 law granted a collective amnesty to Franco's collaborators, the conservative daily El Mundo pointed out in an editorial, accusing Zapatero and Garzon of "reawakening old ghosts."

Prosecutors have also asked Garzon to shelve the case, arguing that the National Court was not competent to investigate disappearances under Franco.

A priest interviewed by El Mundo said Garzon tried to tarnish the reputation of the Catholic Church, which was one of the pillars of the Franco regime.

On the other hand, the far-left party Izquierda Unida (IU) welcomed Garzon's move as "essential."

Associations representing victims said Garzon brought hope to thousands of people who did not know where their relatives were buried.

It was time for the state to take over the exhumation of republican remains from mass graves, said Santiago Macias of the ARMH, which has dug up the bones of about
1,200 people.

It had been contradictory for the National Court not to tackle human rights violations in Spain after investigating them under Latin American dictatorships, commentators pointed out.

"The time has come" to honour civil war victims, "not to divide society," but to avoid a repetition of the past, Leire Pajin of the Socialist Party said. (dpa)