more brutal in mid-1944, when they were co-ordinated with the Soviet Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive and incursions inside Finnish territory involved partisan detachments as large as 200 fighters during this time. In total, between 170 and 182 Finnish civilians died in the attacks, 50 were wounded and 20 went missing. Seitajärvi massacre Forty-eight Soviet partisans attacked the village of Seitajärvi in the municipality of Savukoski at 3:00 a.m. on 7 July 1944. The village was protected by nine soldiers of the Finnish Army. Barking dogs awakened the villagers, but the Finnish soldiers, taken by surprise, were quickly overrun by the partisans. The latter lured the civilians to come out of hiding by promising that they would not be hurt, speaking to them in Finnish. Then the partisans took the civilians with them and set most of the buildings in the village on fire. The Finnish anti-partisan unit Sau arrived on the scene nine hours after the attack and found dead bodies with the help of search dogs in a nearby forest. The women and children who were taken as prisoners by the partisans had been killed by shooting and stabbing them with knives and bayonets. Some of the women had also been raped. Fourteen civilians and two Finnish soldiers had been killed altogether. One eight-year-old girl who had been stabbed played dead and survived. The anti-partisan unit Sau kept tracking the partisans and found the trail of the troops. They fought until the morning and killed 33 partisans in total, but the main bulk of the partisans had managed to escape over the Kemijoki river. According to the official Soviet report which falsified information, the partisans destroyed a "Finnish garrison" and killed 94 men. In the aftermath of the attack, a doctor from neutral Sweden was requested to perform autopsies on the victims. The administrative board of the Norrbotten County sent a doctor named Richard Lindgren to perform the task. Two Swedish newspapers, the Norrbottens-Kuriren and Norrländska Socialdemokraten, followed him to report on the attacks. The autopsies found that the civilians had been either shot in the head or neck. A five-year-old girl called Valma had been stabbed to the head with a knife and seven-month-old Ritva had died from blunt force trauma to the head. The rapes could not be unambiguously proven in the autopsies, as the bodies had already been washed and had also decomposed since it had been nine