MADRID: Spain’s civil war still stirs up intense debate on the evidence today of an academic forum delving into one of the conflict's worst episodes -- the 1936 massacre perpetrated by General Franco's forces at Badajoz.

Franco's nationalist troops carried out the killings in the western town on the Portuguese border in August 1936 but the extent of the massacre divides specialists to this day.

Did 4,000 people die, as reported at the time by American journalist Jay Allen, or only a few hundred, as suggested by later accounts which exercised minds at this week's international congress in Madrid on the war.

Historians cite Badajoz, along with the Basque city of Guernica, bombed by Franco's German allies in 1937, as an example of how fierce the conflict became while showing that the nationalists were initially bent on the “extermination” of the republican camp which backed the elected Second Republic.

Franco usurped the Republic with his 1936 coup d'etat.

Moroccan troops and legionnaires from a column commanded by lieutenant-colonel Juan Yague, who were headed for Madrid from the south, took Badajoz on August 14, 1936.

There followed three days of indiscriminate killings, particularly around the local bull ring, of republican militia and supporters.

But the extent of the killing is still not clear.

Allen, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, reached the city several days later and alerted international public opinion in a hard-hitting article that dubbed Badajoz the “City of Horrors” and said 4,000 people had been “butchered”.

Franco supporters at the time insisted that Allen's account was “propaganda” and that view continues to be voiced today by “revisionist” historians and writers including Pio Moa and Cesar Vidal.

Vidal, in his recent book “The War That Franco Won,” which has been one of this year's top sellers in Spain, criticises the “legend of the supposed massacre at Badajoz”.

While Vidal does recognise that summary executions took place, he insists that they numbered barely 200 deaths in the city.

Hector Alonso Garcia, who is currently preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of Valencia, told the academic congress on today he believed that between 500 and 700 republicans were executed by firing squad.

According to Garcia there are other more reliable accounts, including those of Portuguese journalist Felix Correia from the Diario de Lisboa and also French correspondent Marcel Dany.

Neither of those two gave a clear casualty figure, though Correia spoke of around 2,000 deaths. However, the same correspondent clearly mentioned that there had been “executions en masse”.

According to lieutenant-colonel Yague himself, interviewed shortly after the massacre by John Whitaker of the New York Herald Tribune, the figure might well have been far higher, however.

“Of course we killed them. Do you think I was going to leave 4,000 Reds behind me while my column was on a forced march?” Yague told him.—AFP