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An American team challenges DNA-based
British research that bodies in a mass grave are the tsar's family, writes
Roger Highfield
The fate of the Russian royal family was plunged into
renewed controversy yesterday after scientists cast doubt over British DNA
tests on bones recovered from a mass grave.
One of the most riveting detective stories of the last
century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government formally
declared that the bones were those of the Romanovs,
who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
But in a paper for the seventh International Ancient DNA
Conference in Brisbane, a team from Stanford University
near San Francisco will this week question tests by Home Office
forensic scientists.
Dr Peter Gill and his team at the Forensic Science Service
used genetic testing with the help of five cubic centimetres
of blood from Prince Philip and other relatives of the Romanovs
to announce in 1993 that they had proved "virtually beyond doubt"
that broken bones found in a grave in Yekaterinburg in July 1991 were those
of Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family.
The remains were brought to Britain by Dr Pavel Ivanov of the Russian
Academy of Sciences and Dr Gill concluded that there was almost a 99 per
cent probability that five of the nine skeletons were those of the tsar,
the tsarina and three of their daughters.
But Dr Alec Knight, who conducted the study with colleagues
at Stanford, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Eastern Michigan University
and Los Alamos National Laboratory, claimed: "Our team has what
appears to be overwhelming evidence to reject the conclusion of the
identity of the remains as those of the Russian royal family."
Dr Knight and his team questioned the results, raised
"forensic irregularities" and conducted an independent DNA
analysis of the preserved finger of the late Grand Duchess Elisabeth -
sister of Tsarina Alexandra, one of the 1918 victims.
Since the 1982 opening of Elisabeth's coffin in Jerusalem,
the finger had been preserved in a reliquary at the New York home of Bishop
Anthony Grabbe, the president of the
now-disbanded Orthodox Palestine Society. Crucially, tests on the finger
failed to match the tsarina's DNA reported by Dr Gill.
Though Dr Knight's trip was funded by the Russian Expert
Commission Abroad - a group of scholars who challenge the assertion that
the bones are royal - he maintains that his
experiments were unbiased.
"[The Commission Abroad] didn't support the DNA tests
or do the science," he said. "They just bought me the plane
ticket and got me the sample. They had no control over the work."
Dr Knight argues that the Home Office results were too good
to be true and doubts the researchers could have obtained such long
stretches of DNA from old bones, particularly those that had spent more
than 70 years in a shallow, wet earthen grave.
"Based on what we know now, those bones were
contaminated," Dr Knight said, citing strong evidence that the bone
samples were tarnished with fresh, less-degraded DNA - from an individual
who handled the samples, a claim that is disputed by Dr Gill.
Experts are divided on the issue of DNA preservation. Dr
Peter de Knijff, head of the Forensic Laboratory
for DNA Research at Leiden University in the
Netherlands, agrees that the Gill-Ivanov study
was "unrealistically solid".
But Dr Tom Parsons of the Armed Forces DNA Identification
Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, has found that larger DNA fragments can
survive.
Dr Knight said:"We have
uncovered irregularities and inconsistencies (and very strange goings-on)
in the case, and the results claimed by the DNA tests are essentially
impossible.
"We are not questioning the integrity of Dr Gill or Dr
Parsons but rather the actions of those in Russia who had control of all
the samples, concluded at the outset that they were the royal family, acted
with secrecy and deception, distributed the samples to the labs in other
countries, participated in the analyses, wrote a report concluding
identity, and then voted on acceptance of that report."
Dr Kevin Sullivan, a casework standards manager at the
Forensic Science Service, another of the Home Office team, said: "We
have every confidence in our results which have been reproduced and
independently confirmed by two other world-renowned DNA laboratories.
"We were able to conclude that the remains were those
of the Romanovs because they match the DNA of
known living maternal relatives of the tsar and tsarina, including Prince
Philip, all of which were analysed after the
results were generated from the bones." He added: "The DNA result
generated from the shrivelled finger is different
to that of Prince Philip and therefore could not have come from the Grand
Duchess Elisabeth or any other maternal relative."
The Stanford team's initial findings were reported in the
January/February issue of the Annals of Human Biology but were dismissed at
the time by Dr Gill, who told the journal Science that Dr Knight's research
"comes across as vindictive and political".
But Dr Knight said the case against the original analysis
had strengthened since the paper in the Annals. "Calling us names, as
Dr Gill has done, will not help their fatally flawed position."
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