Forensic examination reveals that the skulls and bones recently found at Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace in the capital, Kabul, relate to the Taliban regime, a senior official says.

Sayed Zafar Hashimi, a spokesman for the Presidential Palace, said in a press conference on Sunday in Kabul that forensic report shows the victims lost their lives 15 years ago.

Hashimi said, “They might have been killed.” The victims included two children, two women and two men, he added.

In early October, the palace said in a statement that the remains were found beneath a kitchen, without elaborating on the identity and cause of the death of the people.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and Physicians for Human Rights were assigned to identify the bodies. The commission was set up by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to investigate the case.

The Taliban militant group ruled the war-torn country between 1996 and 2001 under former leader Mullah Omar, who died in 2013. The years of Taliban rule were marked by brutality and summary executions in public.

Similar findings of bones in the past have led to the discovery of mass graves of unidentified victims of war in Afghanistan. A mass grave containing about 2,000 bodies was found in a 2002 unearthing operation in the north of the country. Most of those bodies belonged to former Taliban militants who were reportedly killed in prisons after the US-led invasion of 2001 ended the five-year Taliban rule.

A mass grave was discovered in 2008, where the body of Afghanistan’s first president, Mohammad Daud Khan, was found. The grave also had the corpses of 15 other victims, all of them assassinated along with Daud Khan in the Presidential Palace in a coup in 1978.