Russian prosecutors announced an investigation on Friday after the discovery of what are thought to be the remains of the last two unaccounted children of murdered Tsar Nicholas II: his heir Alexei and daughter Maria.
In a statement, the prosecutor general’s office said it was reopening a criminal investigation into the 1918 murder of Russia’s royal family outside the Ural mountains’ city of Yekaterinburg by Bolshevik forces.
During research carried out last month in the area where the royal family perished, ”fragments were found of the bodies of two persons, bearing signs of violent death”, the statement said. According to preliminary information, the remains were of a boy aged 10 to 14 and of a young woman aged 20.
”The current hypothesis is that the remains are those of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov and of her Majesty Princess Maria Nikolayevna Romanov, shot on the night of July 16 to 17 1918.
”Identification of the remains will be carried out at the forensic medicine centre of Sverdlovsk province,” where Yekaterinburg is located, the statement said.
If confirmed, the discovery of the crown prince and princess would represent a major breakthrough for those trying to lay to rest the mystery surrounding the killing of Russia’s last royals.
In 1998, experts exhumed and ceremonially reburied what were widely considered to be the remains of Nicholas; his wife, Alexandra; three of their daughters; a royal doctor; and three servants.
Some of the royal family’s descendants are currently fighting in the courts to have the family officially rehabilitated as victims of Soviet political repression.
On Friday, the state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said that Alexei and Maria had been buried separately from the other family members in order to help cover up the killings.
Beside their bodies were found the bullets presumably used to kill them and ceramic vessels thought to have contained sulphuric acid used to disfigure their bodies and hinder identification.
Despite exhaustive scientific testing of the remains, controversy surrounded the reburial of Nicholas II, with some experts and the Orthodox Church still doubting the authenticity of the bodies that were reburied in Saint Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress.
In 2000, the Orthodox Church canonised Nicholas II and his family. — Sapa-AFP