MADRID, Nov 18 (AFP) - A Spanish judge on Thursday ordered the exhumation of the bodies of 30 of the 62 Spanish peacekeepers who died in a military air crash in Turkey along with 13 Ukrainian crew members last year.
The passengers and crew were killed while returning from a mission in Afghanistan. Their NATO-chartered Ukrainian-operated Yak-42 plane crashed into a mountain in fog near Trabzon on the Black Sea on May 26, 2003 in what was Spain's worst peacetime military air disaster.
Judicial sources said judge Teresa Palacios intends the exhumations to begin on Monday and that the bodies, which are buried at various locations across Spain, be brought to Madrid for identification before the remains are handed over to their respective families.
The accident led to a political scandal after it emerged that in the Spanish authorities' haste to identify the bodies in time for their funerals 30 victims were wrongly identified.
The former conservative government in power at the time has also been widely lambasted for chartering an old aircraft, a move which sparked fury in Spain and led to the removal from active service of two generals involved in identifying the bodies.
Following the crash it emerged that the Turkish doctors had correctly identified the bodies they recovered and that all the errors were made by Spanish military doctors who arrived to take over the operation.
Spain's new Socialist government has as a result of the confusion promised an overhaul of the Spanish joint chiefs of staff by January.
Families of the victims have tried without success to force the resignation of conservative lawmaker Federico Trillo, who was defence minister at the time of the disaster.
11/18/2004 19:27 GMT - AFP