Moscow – The remains of the last czar’s hemophiliac son and heir to the Russian throne, missing since the royal family was gunned down nine decades ago by Bolsheviks in a basement room, may have been found, an archaeologist said Thursday.
Bones were found in a burned area in the ground near Yekaterinburg, where Czar Nicholas II and his family were held captive and then shot in 1918.
A top local archaeologist said the bones belong to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of the czar’s son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also have never been found.
If confirmed, the finding would solve a persistent mystery about the doomed family, which fell victim to the revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule.
It comes almost a decade after remains identified as those of Nicholas, his wife and three of his daughters were reburied in a ceremony made possible by the Soviet collapse but shadowed by statements of doubt about their authenticity.
The spot where the remains were found this summer appears to correspond to a site described by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family’s killers, said Sergei Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg.
Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The next year, they were sent to Yekaterinburg, where a firing squad executed Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and four attendants in a small basement room in a nobleman’s house.
Parts of the royal bodies were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in 1998 in the imperial-era capital of St. Petersburg, after years of investigation and DNA tests in Britain and the U.S. But the bodies of Alexei and one of the czar’s daughters, either Maria or Anastasia, remained missing.
The two daughters were only a year apart, and DNA testing cannot distinguish between siblings.
Most Russian scientists believe the missing daughter was Maria, and scientific tests have indicated the bones of Anastasia were among the remains buried.
