Ximo Puig remembers victims of Alicante’s Central Market air attack 84 years ago

THE President of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig, took to social media on Wednesday, May 25 to remember the innocent lives taken away 84 years ago from the air attack on the Central Market of Alicante.

The Valencian Government president said on Twitter: “So many innocents killed. 84 years since the air attack on the Central Market of Alicante. A day to remember. A symbol of the senselessness of war. Yesterday and unfortunately today.”

https://twitter.com/ximopuig/status/1529404144729178114

The bombing of the Central Market of Alicante on May 25, 1938, was one of the bloodiest and most indiscriminate air attacks that occurred during the Spanish civil war, which reportedly left more than 300 dead.

They appear in the register of the Municipal Cemetery (100 men, 56 women, more than 10 children and more than 100 unidentified people), an undetermined number of buried in nearby towns of the Province of Alicante and more than 1,000 injured.

In Alicante, at 11.18 am on Wednesday, May 25, 1938, between 7 and 9 planes, Italian Savoia S-79 “Sparviero” planes bombed the Central Market full of people.

The city suffered more than seventy bombardments during the war, it had anti-aircraft shelters with a capacity for more than 30,000 people, but that morning no one could reach them because of the surprise attack.

The bombing had great international repercussions. On May 27, 1938, the Spanish government presented a note of protest to the governments of France and the United Kingdom and the British formed a commission to investigate the effects and circumstances of the attack.

The commission arrived in Alicante on August 22 and ruled that it had been a “deliberate attack on a civilian area.” The victims, for the most part, were buried in common graves in the Municipal Cemetery of Alicante and remained without a tombstone or any reminder until 1995.

El bombardeo del 25 de mayo, ocurrido en el Mercado Central de Alicante en el año 1938, fue uno de los ataques aéreos más sangrientos e indiscriminados ocurridos durante la guerra civil española, con un balance de más de 300 muertos. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/J5DlLWa0yQ

— Asociación Memoria Histórica Distrito de Latina (@MESA_MH_LATINA) May 25, 2022

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