Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/155

 The papers of the Red yet contain many more proofs of the spirit of cruelty reigning among them. The Government received letters from the relatives of the murdered requesting investigation, and so an enquiry was often instituted. In reality, there was very little to investigate, for generally the writer already knew the names of the murderers. Nevertheless an inquest was held.

On the 3rd April a murder and robbery was investigated in the parish of Sibbo. The two murderers confess, but are not imprisoned. They only receive a warning not to absent themselves. On the 2nd April the perpetrators of the murder of an innkeeper in the parish of Mohla are brought to trial. They are two young Red Guardsmen. They seized the innkeeper in his home, and took him before the Staff. Here he was sentenced to death. They then seized him again, and were going to take him to the wood, but on the way he ran to a little house where some of his relatives lived. He begged and prayed the two to shoot him near the house, so that his body might remain with his people, but this could not be allowed. He was shot in the wood, his body rifled and thrown into the river. When the members of the Staff were examined, they explained that the innkeeper had been sentenced by them in their capacity of members of the "summary court-martial," because he was an eager adherent of the butchers. They had ordered him to be shot, but had not taken the trouble to ascertain whether or how the sentence was accomplished. The solemn abolition of capital punishment was not thus taken seriously by the tribunals themselves. In the parish of Strömfors the Red Guardsmen openly confess to having murdered and plundered two peasants. On the 22nd February a crofter's son has been murdered, and the body rifled and thrown into the river; also the