days since the attack happened. Based on physical marks on the bodies and the position of the bodies on the scene, it was concluded that rapes had happened and this was reported by the Norrländska Socialdemokraten. Lokka massacre Twenty-one civilians were killed in the village of Lokka, Sodankylä, on 14 July 1944. The partisan group Stalinets attacked the village from three directions at 7:45 p.m. after one partisan had been caught nearby and fired at with a rifle by a Finnish civilian. The school building where the civilians were hiding was then set on fire by the partisans. The partisans shot at people who tried to help them escape the burning structure through a window. Hilja Kumpula and five of her children perished in the fire, the youngest of whom was a one-month-old baby. The detachment managed to escape unharmed before units of the Finnish Army could reach them. Gennady Kupriyanov, who was leading the partisan activity, claimed in his report that the village was a "heavily fortified garrison". In reality, the NKVD had accurate intelligence on the village and the partisans had been monitoring it for days, knowing it had no combatants. Legacy The partisan attacks were not a widely-known topic in Finland until the 1990s. This was in part due to the official Finnish position of friendly relations with the Soviet Union after the war, which even made them a sort of “forbidden topic”, and some publishers avoided books about it. This changed when journalist and author Veikko Erkkilä published his book Vaiettu sota () in 1998. Public awareness and debate ensued and Erkkilä was given a state award for an information publication () by the Finnish Government. In Russia, the Soviet partisans in Finland are held in high regard as heroes of the Great Patriotic War. A conference of reconciliation was held in Sodankylä in September 2002. It was attended by 150 people, including Finnish and Russian researchers, victims of the partisan attacks and two Soviet partisan veterans. The former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Elisabeth Rehn acted as patroness for the conference. There, the long-standing silence on the raids and also the war-time response of the Finnish authorities were criticized. Criminal investigation Olavi Alakulppi, a captain in the Finnish Army who witnessed the aftermath of the Seitajärvi raid, tried to influence a United Nations commission to investigate the Soviet partisan attacks in Finland as a war