New photos of executed Che Guevara discovered in Spain 50 years on

Lost for half a century, historic photographs of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara taken by an Agence France-Presse photographer shortly after his execution have come to light in a small Spanish town.

The guerilla leader lies in a stretcher with his dead eyes open, his bare chest stained with blood and dirt, in the eight black-and-white photographs taken after he was shot by the Bolivian army in October 1967.

The photographs belong to Imanol Arteaga, a local councillor in the northern Spanish town of Ricla. He inherited them from his uncle Luis Cuartero, a missionary in Bolivia in the 1960s.

"He brought back the photographs when he came for my parents' wedding in November 1967," said Arteaga, 45. "My aunt and my mother told me a French journalist had given them to him."

He and his aunt found the photos among Cuartero's belongings after the missionary died in 2012.

Other rare colour photographs of Guevara's body by AFP correspondent Marc Hutten, taken after it was laid out by Bolivian soldiers, were published in the international media at the time.