The circumstances surrounding the death of poet and playwright Federico Garcìa Lorca, who was assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, have long been shrouded in controversy. The prevailing wisdom is that he was killed for his left-wing views, although some have suggested the poet’s sexual orientation played a role, and his grave has never been found.

In the fall of 2009, an excavation to uncover Garcìa Lorca’s remains yielded nothing. Now, however, an historian from the city of Granada may have solved the mystery of who Lorca’s executioners actually were and where the writer was buried.

Miguel Caballero Pérez has published a Spanish-language book called The Last 13 Hours of Garcìa Lorca, which contains the results of three years the author spent rifling through archival material searching for details about Garcìa Lorca’s death. According to the Guardian, the new book purports to identify the career policemen and volunteers who acted as a firing squad and to situate the poet’s burial site “in an area of open countryside near a farm called Cortijo de Gazpacho, between the villages of Viznar and Alfacar,” a scant half-kilometre from the site that was dug up in 2009.

From the Guardian:

Some of the [firing] squad probably did not even know who Lorca was. “These were not the sort of people who read poetry. Lorca’s work was largely read by the elites,” [Caballero] said. “They would have been more interested in the two anarchists shot with him, who had a reputation for being very dangerous.” But both the firing squad commander, a stern 53-year-old policeman called Mariano Ajenjo, and a volunteer member called Antonio Benavides “ who was a relative of the first wife of Lorca’s father “ would have known who he was. “I gave that fat-head a shot in the head,” Benavides reportedly boasted later.