Federico García Lorca’s family won’t oppose the opening of a mass grave where his body is believed to have been dumped after Franco supporters allegedly executed the poet and playwright at the outbreak of Spain’s Civil War, a leading daily said Thursday.

“We will not oppose it,” Laura García Lorca, the poet’s niece, was quoted as saying by El País. “Although we would prefer it weren’t done, we respect the wishes of the other parties involved.”

No one at the Federico García Lorca Foundation was immediately available to comment, but the center said it would release a statement later in the day.

Last week, relatives of two other men believed to be buried in the same grave asked National Court judge Baltasar Garzon to order the grave opened. The request is part of a surging nationwide movement to give proper burial to the thousands of people known to have been killed by supporters of the late dictator General Francisco Franco and buried in mass graves.

But García Lorca’s family has long preferred to let the matter rest, leaving one of the 1936-39 war’s most intriguing mysteries — the whereabouts of the poet’s body — unresolved.

Investigations indicate the poet, who was open about his homosexuality, was shot along with a schoolteacher named Dioscoro Galindo Gonzalez and two labor union activists — Francisco Galadi and Juan Arcolla — on August 18, 1936, near the Viznar mountain gorge in his native province of Granada in the south.

The four bodies are believed to lie in a site close to an olive tree, and the site has since been designated a memorial park to local victims. Others claim the burial spot is some 400 meters away.

Several thousand others are believed to have been shot and dumped at the gorge.