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Mass Grave Believed to Contain Bodies of 'Forest Brothers'
Two days of excavation by forensic researchers and historians near Võru, a town in southern Estonia, has recently uncovered a mass grave dating back to the post-World War II period.
The burial site contains the bodies of 10 men, all of whom died of gunshots or blunt-force trauma.
The men are believed to have been members of Estonia's post-war anti-Soviet resistance, probably killed by officers of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police organization under Stalin.
The Estonian resistance - the so-called "Forest Brothers" - held out longest in the Võru region. They fought Soviet occupation into the late 1940s and early 1950s, until they were hunted down and killed.
The mass grave was discovered near a road that was built through the forest in the 1970s.
Since that forest was the site of one of the last big resistance battles in 1953, and since the NKVD issued orders to bury resistance fighters in secret graves, researchers believe that they have uncovered a decades-old murder scene.
"These factors make it a relatively high certainty that this is a secret burial ground in the forest," said military historian Arnold Unt.
Unt added that the presence of many bodies makes it more likely that forensic and historical researchers will be able to determine what precisely happened to those men in the forest so many years ago.
Andres Kahar