Bones find 'may be remains of last Tsar's heir'

The remains of the last tsar’s son and heir to the Russian throne, missing since the royal family was gunned down nine decades ago by Bolsheviks in a basement, may have been found, an archaeologist said.

Bones found in the remnants of a bonfire near Yekaterinburg, the city where Nicholas II and his wife and children were held prisoner and then shot in 1918, belong to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of the tsar’s son, Alexei, and a sister whose remains have also never been found, a leading archaeologist said.

If confirmed, the find would solve a persistent mystery and fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed family – victims of the violent revolution which ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule.

It was reported by Sergei Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional centre 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, Mr 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 by telephone.

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 into a truck and disposed of first in a mine shaft, according to most accounts.

Parts of the royal bodies were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in the Imperial-era capital, St Petersburg, in 1998. But the remains of the haemophiliac heir, Alexei, and of one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia, have remained missing.