FYI
Posted on AFP Worldwide News Service:
MOSCOW (AFP) - The Romanov family dismissed a Japanese scientist's claim that remains found in a grave in the central city of Yekaterinburg and later enterred in Saint Petersburg were as claimed those of Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family.
AFP/File Photo
"The family itself is not bothered by the opinions of Japanese researchers," Ivan Artsishevsky, a spokesman for the Association of Romanov Family Members in Russia, said on Russia's Echo Moskvi radio station.
"We feel that scientific disputes should be worked out in the scientific arena," he said.
Many questions surrounding identification of the remains were studied in depth by experts on a special state committee before Russia officially accepted the conclusion that they were the remains of Nicholas II and his family while "here we have one researcher saying that he has his own results."
"The family doesn't agree with this," Artsishevsky told the radio station.
His comments came after the Russian Orthodox Church reported Thursday the conclusions of the Japanese research team led by Tatsuo Nagai, the director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Kitodzato in Japan.
Nagai's research was based on an analysis of DNA contained in blood and sweat stains on a scarf that the young Tsar Nicholas II was wearing when he was attacked while travelling in Japan around the turn of the last century and preserved in Japan ever since.
Comparison of that DNA with the DNA in the remains showed that they were not those of the late tsar, his wife, and three of the couple's four daughters, all of whom were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 a year after their revolution.
After extensive analysis conducted in Russia and abroad, notably in Britain, the remains were officially accepted as authentic by the Russian government in 1998 and were enterred in a ceremony in Saint Petersburg alongside those of other members of the once-ruling Romanov family.
Forensic experts in Britain asserted at the time that the probability that the remains were indeed those of the tsar and his family stood at 99 percent.
The Russian Orthodox Church however has skirted the issue and the head of the church, Patriarch Alexei II, declined to attend the Saint Petersburg ceremony.
