2004-12-09 13:10     * RUSSIA * ROMANOVS * REMAINS * AUTHENTICITY *

JAPANESE SCIENTISTS CAST DOUBT OVER IMPERIAL REMAINS IN ST. PETERSBURG

MOSCOW, Dec 9 (RIA Novosti) - The saga of the remains of the Romanov imperial family, executed by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg in 1918, has taken a new staggering turn. Japanese scientists have examined the remains that were buried in St. Petersburg in 1998 and concluded that they do not belong to the Romanovs, Gazeta reports.

Kitozato Tatsuo Nagai, the director of the Japanese Institute of Forensic Medicine and Science, informed the Russian Orthodox Church about the examination's results. Unlike previous researchers, the Japanese group had a handkerchief with traces of Nicholas II's blood and sweat at their disposal. In 1997, Dr. Nagai published the results of comparing the DNA from the handkerchief with the DNA of the remains discovered in Yekaterinburg. On this occasion, scientists compared the DNA of the czar, his nephew Tikhon and the buried remains for the first time. The Moscow Patriarchate's Web site reads that the examination "rejects the position of the state committee that in 1998 officially recognized the bones found near Yekaterinburg as the remains of the czar's family."

"There is no reliable evidence about the location of the real remains," said Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy chairman of the Patriarchy's foreign church relations department.

Boris Nemtsov, a member of the Union of Right Forces' federal political council, who chaired the committee in 1998, disagrees with the Church. The committee used relied on examinations conducted in Great Britain and the US, he says. The final conclusion was made after a test on expensive equipment, now kept at Defense Ministry Laboratory 122 in Rostov-on-Don, which has since been used to identify victims of the Beslan tragedy. This allowed scientists to declare that the remains were authentic with a 99.999999999% degree of accuracy.

Most of the Romanov line's descendants agree with the Russian Orthodox Church that the remains buried in St. Petersburg do not belong to the czar's family. Only Prince Dmitry Romanovich attended the burial in 1998. "For me it is not important whether it is them or not, for me it is a feeling, a symbol of the past," he said at the time.