Russian Federation exhumes bones of murdered Tsar Nicholas and wife

Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, their four daughters – grand duchesses Olga, Maria, Anastasia and Tatiana – the Tsarevich Alexei, their son and four royal staff members were killed in 1918 in a distant house in Yekaterinburg.

On Wednesday, investigators took samples from the remains of Nicholas and Alexandra in a bid to confirm the identification of Alexei’s and Maria’s remains. A criminal investigation into the murder of the tsar and his family was opened in 1993, but in 1998 the investigation was closed on the grounds that all the suspects were already dead.

The family was killed by revolutionary Bolsheviks in the Urals area in a basement.

In July, the church urged that the case be reopened ahead of the centenary of the murder, so that all the members of the family might be buried together. But the Bolsheviks later removed the remains, burned them, corroded them with acid and reburied them in an unknown location.

The Romanovs’ suspected remains were finally unearthed in 1991, and in 2008 U.S. and Russian experts confirmed through genetic testing that they belonged to the tsar, his wife and three of his daughters.

If the matter is settled, the tragic family will be reunited in the crypt of the iconic gold-spired Peter and Paul Fortress, burial place of the Romanovs, in a ceremony later this year.

But their remains have since been stored at the Russian State Archives, amid doubts over their identity.

The remains of nine victims were found in a mass grave in 1993.

A previous investigation concluded that the remains were indeed those of Maria and Alexei, but a working group set up at the instigation of the Russian Orthodox Church insisted that further tests be carried out, the statement said. “For this reason it’s very important to make sure”. Positive proof would, however, lead to questions arising about why the bodies were separated from those of the other family members.