Russia exhumes czar's remains in new probe

Russian investigators have exhumed the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his wife to determine whether body parts unearthed eight years ago are those of two of their children.

Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and their five children were executed in 1918 as White Army forces closed in on the Bolsheviks holding them prisoner.

Russia first looked into the murder of the Romanov family after a mass grave was discovered in 1991 near Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where the royal couple and their children were exiled and shot after the Russian Revolution.

Scientists said that DNA evidence was sufficient to conclude that the grave contained the remains of the czar and czarina, along with three of their daughters, and the government officially identified them in 1998.

The remains were then re-buried in the erstwhile imperial capital Saint Petersburg.

In 2007, a second grave was discovered at a different location containing two more bodies, believed to be those of the czar's heir Alexei and daughter Maria. But their remains have since been stored at the Russian State Archives, amid doubts over their identity.

Vladimir Solovyov, a leading investigator involved in the probe, told the Echo of Moscow radio station that researchers had taken “samples from Nicholas II, from the empress, and from the uniform of emperor Alexander II,” the last czar's grandfather, who was himself assassinated in 1881.

“We have decided to start again from the very beginning and carry out renewed examinations,” said Solovyov. The remains will be subject to genetic testing, he added.

While Russian criminal investigators ruled in 2008 that the remains of Alexei and Maria were authentic after DNA testing, their identities have not been accepted by the Russian Orthodox Church, which canonized the Romanovs, nor by some Romanov descendants.

In July, the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church pressed for the case to be reopened.

The question of the authenticity of the remains has taken on fresh urgency ahead of the looming centenary of the murder, as Russia wants to bury all seven family members together.

Wire services