Madrid- The Spanish public prosecutor's office Monday appealed against an unprecedented judicial investigation into the crimes committed by dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from 1939 to 1975 after winning the 1936-39 civil war.

National Court judge Baltasar Garzon was not competent to investigate disappearances of Franco's opponents, which could only be handled by courts in the regions where they occurred, the prosecutors argued in the appeal lodged at the same court.

The rights of Franco's victims were also guaranteed by a 2007 law aimed at rehabilitating their memory, for which reason there was no need for the investigation launched by Garzon, the prosecutors said.

The move added to the controversy raging in Spain over the initiative of Garzon, who ranks Franco's acts of repression against opponents as crimes against humanity.

Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, on the other hand, regards them as ordinary crimes which come under the statute of limitations and are covered by a 1977 amnesty granted to Franco's collaborators, according to the daily El Pais.

Garzon's initiative is the first one by the Spanish judiciary to investigate disappearances of Franco's opponents killed in reprisals during the war, which was sparked by Franco's uprising against the legal republican government, and during his right-wing dictatorship.

The Franco regime honoured its own dead, but tens of thousands of his opponents still lie in mass graves. Garzon puts the total number of Franco's victims at more than 100,000.

Garzon's initiative has been hailed by the families of his victims, but Spain's conservative opposition accuses the judge of reopening old wounds.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government passed a law to rehabilitate Franco's victims in 2007, including measures such as removing Francoist monuments and some support to associations exhuming remains from mass graves. (dpa)