The remains will undergo detailed forensic examination, the IPN announced on Thursday.
Dr. Artur Piekarz, head of the IPN’s Lublin Office of Search and Identification, stated that the investigation aimed to locate the graves of individuals executed in the Lublin Castle prison or killed in anti-partisan operations.
During the excavation, two graves were studied. In one grave, researchers found the complete skeletons of four men, all bearing gunshot wounds to the skull, which suggests they were likely prisoners of Lublin Castle. Scattered buttons were also discovered among the remains, supporting the hypothesis of their status as detainees.
The skeletal remains were layered in two levels within the grave: the upper layer, 1.2 meters deep, contained two skeletons stacked partially on their sides, while the lower layer, at 1.7 meters, held two additional skeletons. A second grave, located beneath a modern burial, revealed scattered bones, including an arm bone and ribs, at a depth of 2.35 meters.
All remains have been sent to the Department of Forensic Medicine at Lublin Medical University, where they will undergo medical and genetic analysis for potential identification.
According to IPN historians, up to 400 individuals may have been buried in unmarked graves at the Unicka Street cemetery. These individuals, mostly political dissidents, were either killed or died from torture, overcrowding, disease, and starvation while imprisoned at Lublin Castle between 1944 and 1954, a period when over 30,000 people were detained under the brutal conditions imposed by the communist regime.
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Source: PAP