The bodies and several bones were unearthed from several sites at the former military base at the foot of a mountain at Dajti, about 15 kilometres (9 miles) from the city, police said.

“All those whose bodies have been found were executed with single gunshots to the head,” Prime Minister Sali Berisha said.

Berisha said DNA tests would be carried out to identify the remains.

Jovan Plaku told AFP that he had been searching the deserted base for several months to find the remains of his father, a former political prisoner whom the Communist regime executed in 1976 for “betraying the country”.

However, it seemed that his father’s remains were not among those unearthed in the base, he said.

The corpses and at least six bags containing bones were taken to Tirana city morgue, Plaku said.

Late communist dictator Enver Hoxha led Albania through more than four decades of international isolation, from November 1944 when Albania was liberated after World War II until his death in 1985.

The communist regime remained in power until 1990 when a multiparty system was introduced.

According to associations of former political prisoners, some 5,577 men and 450 women were killed under the communist regime.

More than 26,000 people were imprisoned, while another 32,000 were deported to remote isolated regions, they say.

Since the fall of communism, numerous families have been looking for the remains of executed relatives but there are no records in communist-era archives of where the regime’s secret police buried the “enemies of the state”.  There are claims that the secret police destroyed a large part of the archives.