An American DNA laboratory test confirmed that the remains recently found outside Yekaterinburg are of the children of the last Tsar, St Nikolai II Aleksandrovich, Sverdlovsk oblast Governor Eduard Rossel said. “Now, we have found the entire family”, Mr Rossel told a press conference on Wednesday. It was reported earlier that parts of two human bodies bearing signs of a violent death were found during excavations outside Yekaterinburg on the old Koptyakovskoy Road in July 2007. Preliminary findings indicated that the remains could have been those of a teenager aged from 10 to 14 and a 20-year-old woman. It was assumed that the remains could have been those of Tsarevich St Aleksei, the heir to the throne and only son of the last Russian Tsar, Nikolai II, and Grand Princess Maria, one of the daughters of the tsar, who were executed outside Yekaterinburg in 1918.
The analysis of the remains was assigned to the Sverdlovsk regional forensic medical expert bureau, a Moscow laboratory, the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, and the University of Massachusetts’ genetic laboratory. The experts from the Sverdlovsk bureau reached a preliminary conclusion based on anatomic and morphological analysis that took into account personal, gender, and age factors that there was “a high level of probability that the remains are those of Tsarevich Aleksei and Grand Princess Maria”. Human remains found outside Yekaterinburg in July 1991 were later identified as those of Tsar St Nikolai II, some of his family, and members of the royal retinue. The remains were buried at the Ss Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg on 17 July 1998.
30 April 2008
Interfax–Religion
Voices from Russia 
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