Forty four people died on Palm Sunday, 31 March 1980, during the funeral of Archbishop Romero, as a result of a stampede after some gunmen, allegedly members of security forces (although it has never been corroborated), fired on mourners and on Romero's funeral cortege. The gunmen were never identified. The square in front of the cathedral was the site of celebrations after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War in 1992. The cathedral was finished off with a festive tiled ceramic mural façade by the Salvadoran master Fernando Llort and inaugurated on 19 March 1999. In late December 2012, the Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, ordered the removal of the façade without consulting the national government or the artist himself. Workers chipped off and destroyed all the 2,700 tiles of the mural.