RUSSIA 17 July 2008 Tsar Nicholas II and family executed 90 years ago. All bodies now accounted for

When ceremonies are held in Yekaterinburg to mark the 90th anniversary in July of the execution in that city of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, Empress Alexandra and their children during the Russian civil war, all of the family will be accounted for. DNA tests prove that bone fragments found recently were Prince Alexi, the heir, and Grand Duchess Maria, whose bodies were missing in 1991 when the remains of their parents and three siblings, including the tzar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991. The family was reburied at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg in 1998.

Rumors abounded that some of the family had survived and escaped. Several women had come forward claiming to be Anastasia, and there were pretenders to Alexei's and Maria's identities. The identification of the bone shards will only end the saga of the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia from 1613 until the February Revolution of 1917, and the pretender industry if Romanov descendents and royalists accept the DNA results.

Reviled during the Soviet era, the Romanovs have been partly rehabilitated in post-Soviet times. The Russian Orthodox church canonized the whole family in 2000. Announcing that he won't be able to attend the anniversary ceremony because it conflicts with another of his obligations, Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia reminded Russians that the event was important to the country as a whole, not just Yekaterinburg, because the execution of the royal family marked "the beginning of purges, the great terror to which the nation was subjected."

Building work has started on the first church to be named after Prince Alexei, in the southern Russian town of Gorodovikovsk. May/08

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Patriarch to skip royal family execution anniversary events (Interfax 24 Apr 2008)
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=4601