Nicholas and Alexandra were killed together with their five children, four servants and family dog in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks in 1918, the year after revolution ended their rule.
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The church’s hesitancy to allow the remains of two final members of the family to be buried has divided the Romanovs’ descendants, with one branch of relatives supporting the call for more tests and another expressing impatience with the hold-up.
As part of the case, the bodies of Russia’s last emperor, Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna, would need to be exhumed from their tomb in St Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral, Markin said.
The remains of all the members of the royal family except for Alexei and Maria were found in woods outside Yekaterinburg in 1979. The Romanovs were ousted from power and exiled in 1917, shortly before the communist Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government. But the remains of Alexei Romanov and Maria Romanov, were not found until 2007 and in a different place in the Ural Mountains. DNA tests identified them as the murdered royals.
The murdered Romanov family members are buried at a St Petersburg cathedral.
An investigator involved in the probe, Vladimir Solovyov, said the September 23 exhumation in a St. Petersburg cathedral included “taking samples from Nicholas II, from the empress, and from the uniform of Tsar Alexander II”, the last tsar’s grandfather, who was himself assassinated in 1881.
The Soviet authorities portrayed him as weak, vacillating and despotic but he was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.
They are also seeking access to the remains of the empress’ sister, Grand Duchess Elisabeth of Russia, the Investigative Committee statement said, adding that her remains are in Israel and have never been examined by Russian investigators.
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Vladimir Putin’s prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has led efforts to give them a civilised burial 97 years after they were shot dead, but this will only now happen after the next forensic tests.
