Thursday, February 25, 2010

House of Romanovs wants royal remains to be re-examined

Moscow, February 24, Interfax - The House of Romanovs has said it wants to re-examine what is thought to be the remains of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family found in Yekaterinburg.

"Unfortunately, there is too much confusion in this case and some serious errors were made when the Yekaterinburg remains were being identified," Prince Georgy Mikhailovich, the son of the Romanovs' House head Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, told Interfax on Wednesday.

"Many of the facts uncovered suggest that the Commission was staging a political show for a date, rather than working to establish the truth," Romanov said.

The remains were buried in St. Petersburg in 1998 in haste and in defiance of the opinion of the Russian Orthodox Church and the House of Romanovs, he said.

"No satisfactory answers have been provided to the ten questions, formulated by independent scholars and referred to the Commission back in 1998 by the late Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II. Meanwhile, those were questions, which interested not only experts, but also people and millions of believers. The Church needed to console these people instead of leaving them with a feeling of having been deceived. The Commission did not care. There was a farce instead of an act of repentance and purification," he said.

The remains' authenticity must be further studied, Romanov said.