'They Are Going to Shoot Him!'

No newsmen were permitted to witness last week's executions in Spain. TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott, however, was one of two foreign journalists in a group of reporters allowed to travel to Hoyo de Manzanares, where three of the men accused of killing policemen, Alonso, Sanz and Sanchez-Bravo, were shot by a firing squad. Scott's report:

It was shortly after 4 a.m. The scene was the office of Alonso's defense lawyer, a modest hut in the Madrid suburb of Vallecas. "There is no hope," sighed the lawyer, his eyes red with fatigue. He turned to a telephone and dialed the number of an undertaker in the old Castille village of Hoyo de Manzanares, 18 miles north of Madrid. "Can you take care of a death?" the lawyer asked. "Where is the body?" the undertaker asked. "Haven't you been listening to the radio and television?" the lawyer insisted. "We don't handle these cases," the undertaker coldly replied.

The windows of Carabanchel prison on Madrid's southwest outskirts meanwhile blazed with light. Families of the three condemned men were being allowed a last visit. The mother of one screamed hysterically as she departed. "They are going to shoot him! The police have hurt me!" She was quickly bundled into a car and driven away weeping.

Show of Force. Shortly before 8 o'clock, as fleecy pink clouds gave way to a dull sun, motors revved ominously within the prison compound. A motorcade of 15 Jeeps, paddy wagons, buses and police cars wheeled out and off into the traffic, headed for Hoyo de Manzanares. Near that town was a conveniently isolated artillery training facility in rolling, rocky hills. "Orson Welles has a house up here somewhere," remembered one of the reporters trailing the entourage. "It used to be a great place for making westerns." Guardia Civil lined the routes in pairs at intervals and also guarded overpasses. A gas-station attendant explained that the show of force was due to the fact that "Franco always goes out on Saturdays."

At Hoyo de Manzanares, the convoy disappeared up a twisting, rutted dirt road. Barred from following, we turned off the car motor and listened. Off below, down the road among the boulders and scrub brush, there was a sudden volley of rifle fire. It was 9:25 a.m. At 9:40 a.m. there came a second volley and at 10, a third. Armed police shuffled up and down the dirt road, calmly puffing cigarettes. By 11, the gray vans carrying the remains appeared, en route back to the village. A black car also loomed into view; it contained the local priest who had administered last rites to one of the men. "I can't stop because I must celebrate Mass," said the priest, visibly shaken by what he had seen. "I will not say anything."

Not a single local resident was at the village cemetery; relatives of two of the three men were present, the women sobbing uncontrollably at times. They signed death certificates by the roadside because the Guardia Civil officer in charge refused to allow them to see the gravesites. "You cannot pass," said the officer sternly. "I have my orders." The father of one dead man muttered bitterly, "This is a crazy country if the family cannot attend the burial."

Two other executions also took place that day as planned, one in Burgos and the other in Barcelona. There was no word from El Pardo Palace of Franco's activities of the day. Certainly the gas-station attendant had been ill-informed when he claimed that Franco always goes out on Saturdays.

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