Madrid - Controversy was raging in Spain on Wednesday over a prominent judge's decision to drop the country's first judicial investigation into alleged human rights crimes during the 1936-39 civil war and General Francisco Franco's subsequent 36-year dictatorship.

Representatives of Franco's victims claimed that judge Baltasar Garzon had acted under pressure, while conservative commentators said he did not have jurisdiction over Franco's crimes.

National Court magistrate Garzon announced Tuesday he would not continue investigating Franco's crimes, because the dictator and others potentially responsible for the abuses were no longer alive.

Garzon holds Franco responsible for the killings of more than 100,000 people in acts of repression during the civil war, which was unleashed by the general's insurgency against the republican government, and during the dictatorship.

Atrocities were committed on both sides in the war, but the Franco regime honoured its own dead, while tens of thousands of republicans still lie in mass graves.

Garzon transferred the responsibility for eventual investigations to 62 courts in the regions where mass graves are located.

Some of the judges were expected to launch probes and to authorize the opening of mass graves, while others were not.

The end of Garzon's inquiry "makes everything even more complicated," Marisa Hoyos of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (ARMH) told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The ARMH is the best-known among citizens' groups that have dug up the remains of some 4,000 republicans on their own initiative, to enable their families to give them appropriate funerals.

"It is not decent that our dead are stolen from us and that we are not allowed to recover their remains," says Jesus Gutierrez, who is seeking permission to exhume the bones of his four uncles from a suspected mass grave in La Serna del Monte north of Madrid.

Hoyos and Gutierrez told dpa they believed Garzon to have acted under pressure.

Other analysts, however, said Garzon may have anticipated an expected ruling by the National Court that he did not have jurisdiction over Franco's crimes.

It was logical for Garzon to have stopped the inquiry at this stage, but the problem of the mass graves still needed to be resolved, the left-leaning daily El Pais said in an editorial.

The conservative daily El Mundo accused the judge of having broken legal norms in what it described as his search for notoriety.

Garzon became internationally known when seeking the extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. He has also investigated human rights violations in other Latin American countries and Africa.

Conservative analysts accuse the leftist judge of only handling high-profile cases, and ridiculed him for requesting Franco's death certificate, given that all of Spain knew the dictator to have died in 1975.

Garzon's probe into Franco's crimes was opposed by the public prosecutor's office and some judges at his own court.

The prosecutors appealed against the inquiry, questioning Garzon's stance that Franco's abuses constituted crimes against humanity, and arguing that they had been covered by an amnesty granted to the dictator's collaborators in 1977.

The prosecutors' position was in line with that of the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which grew partly out of Francoist roots.

Gutierrez accused the prosecutors of having deprived Franco's victims of hope, but others felt the debate sparked by Garzon would help to secure government support to associations such as the ARMH.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government has passed a law seeking to rehabilitate Franco's victims, but has been accused of dragging its feet in putting the law into effect.

The Spanish section of the human rights group Amnesty International has described the Franco regime as having killed more opponents than Latin American dictatorships together.

Spain was a worldwide exception in that it had not looked into flagrant human rights abuses in its recent past, Amnesty representative Esteban Beltran said. (dpa)