All family members of Nicholas II are dead - investigator
ST. PETERSBURG. June 5 (Interfax) - Investigators have no doubt that the remains found on the Koptyakovskaya road in Yekaterinburg are those of the late family members of Nicholas II, Vladimir Solovyov, a senior investigator with the Main Department of Criminalistics of the Russian Investigative Committee, who has investigated the Romanov family death since 1993, told reporters on Thursday.
"The first publications on the remains made me doubt. But it was interesting, I had a chance to work in the archive and conduct forensic evaluations and I gradually came to the conclusion that yes, those are the remains of the tsar's family," Solovyov said at the opening of an exhibit devoted to the investigation into the death of the family of Emperor Nicholas II in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.
Solovyov said new serious identification methods appeared in forensic science in the past few years that have helped prove that the remains are those of the tsar's family.
"Among the items displayed at the exhibit is a shirt of Nicholas II which was stained with his blood when he was wounded by a Japanese police officer. That blood has been preserved and it was possible to conduct a full-fledged investigation. We compared the blood of Nickolas II with the remains of Nicholas II," the investigator said.
"The possibility that it is not Nicholas is one divided by ten to the seventeenth power. This figure exceeds the number of all people who have ever lived on earth by billions of times. There is no doubt that those are the remains of the tsar's family," Solovyov said.
Solovyov also said many imposters claimed to be surviving members of the tsar's family through decades.
"Publications are now appearing in the press stating that [Princess] Anastasia survived and her grandson now lives in Yekaterinburg. There were very much such false Anastasias. After 2007, when the remains Crown Prince Alexei and Great Princess Maria were found, no one can say, even theoretically, that anyone [of the family of Nicholas II] survived," he said.
"We can now say with all confidence and without any doubt that these are members of the tsar's family. It's a pity that their remains have still not been buried," Solovyov said.