Tsar’s remains exhumed for new DNA tests

RUSSIAN investigators have reopened an investigation into the death of Tsar Nicholas II and exhumed his remains.

The bones of his German-born empress Alexandra were also removed from a tomb for DNA testing.

The Romanov family members, who were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918, are buried in a cathedral in St Petersburg.

The Russian Orthodox Church wants to confirm family links before other relatives can be reburied alongside them.

DNA tests authenticated the Romanov remains found in 1991 in a mass grave in the Urals. But the tests did not convince some Orthodox Church members, because the bones of two family members – Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria – were only found only in 2007, at a different spot. They are in cardboard boxes in the Russian state archive.

The Investigative Committee, a state body, says new checks are needed so church leaders can be certain about these remains so they can be buried with the family in the Peter and Paul Cathedral.

The Russian royals were shot and bayoneted to death in a dank cellar in Ekaterinburg in 1918, the year after the tsar abdicated and despite their hopes that they would be given refuge in Britain. Their bodies were thrown down mineshafts.

All those Bolsheviks suspected of ordering their deaths or carrying out the murders died decades ago.

‘The re-examination of the criminal case is not an attempt to reconsider the evidence received earlier and established facts,’ said a source. Rather it ‘represents the necessity of investigating the new facts as requested by the Orthodox Church’.

Scientists have no doubt that the correct bones were buried in a ceremony at which Prince Michael of Kent represented the Queen in 1998.

‘Investigating new facts’