This just in 2 hours ago from the Associated Press:
"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 the remnants of a bonfire near Yekaterinburg, the city where Czar Nicholas II and his wife and children were held prisoner 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; either Maria or Anastasia.
"If confirmed, the finding would solve a persistent mystery about the doomed family, which fell victim to the violent revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule.
"The find was reported by Sergei Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg.
The spot where the remains were found this summer appears to correspond to a site described in writing by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family's killers, Pogorelov said on NTV television.
"An anthropologist has determined that the bones belong to two young individuals, a young male apparently aged roughly 10-13 and another, a young woman about 18-23," he told NTV.
"Historians say Communist guards lined up and shot Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and servants in a small basement room in a nobleman's house in Yekaterinburg. The bodies were loaded in a truck and disposed of first in a mine shaft, according to most accounts.
"Parts of the royal remains were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in the Imperial-era capital, St. Petersburg, in 1998. Those of Alexei and of one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia, have remained missing."
If this report is accurate, it means that (finally) we may be near closure on this heartbreaking tragedy.
Regards to all,
Nathan