Wartime Jewish mass grave discovered

The grave, near the Romanian town of Popricani, contained the bodies of men, women and children who were shot dead in 1941, said the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.

The find provided evidence of pogroms against Jewish people in the region, scholars said. Romania's official history taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the such killings.

Reports about the possibility of a mass grave in the forest began to appear in 2002 and local authorities began an investigation but it was suspended after nothing was found.

Experts resumed the investigation and began interviewing witnesses again in 2009, said Romanian historian Adrian Cioflanca.

About 280,000 Jewish people and 11,000 gypsies were killed under regime of pro-fascist dictator Ion Antonescu, who was prime minister from 1940 to 1944. He was executed by communists in 1946.

Historians have documented several pogroms in Romania during the Second World War, including one in June 1941 in the north-eastern city of Iasi where up to 12,000 people are believed to have died in a sweep by Romanian and German soldiers.

Those who did not die were beaten, put in cattle wagons in stifling heat and taken to a small town, where what happened to them was concealed. Of 120 people on the train, only 24 survived.

During the later era of communist rule, the country largely ignored the involvement of Romania's leaders in wartime crimes. The country's role in crimes against Jewish people were minimised by governments after the collapse of communism in 1989.

In 2004, after a dispute with Israel, then-President Ion Iliescu assembled an international panel led by Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel to investigate wartime crimes against Jews in Romania.