Prosecutors said Friday they have reopened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the last Russian czar and his family nearly 90 years ago after an archaeologist said the remains of Nicholas II’s son and heir to the throne may have finally been found.

The announcement of the reopened investigation, while a routine matter, signaled that the government may be taking seriously the claims that were announced Thursday by Yekaterinburg researcher Sergei Pogorelov.

In comments broadcast on NTV, Pogorelov said bones found in a burned area of ground near Yekaterinburg belong to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of Nicholas’ 13-year-old hemophiliac son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also never have been found.Yekaterinburg is the Urals Mountain city where Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were held prisoner and then shot in 1918.


Missing Chapter

If confirmed, the find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanovs, whose reign was ended by the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule. The find comes almost a decade after remains identified as those of Nicholas and Alexandra and three of their daughters were reburied in a ceremony in the imperial-era capital of St. Petersburg. The ceremony, however, was shadowed by statements of doubt — including from within the Russian Orthodox Church — about their authenticity.

On Friday, a church official voiced what appeared to skepticism about the latest find. “I would like to hope that the examination will be more thorough and detailed than the examination of the so-called ‘Yekaterinburg remains,’ which the church did not acknowledge as the remains of members of czar’s family,” Bishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s External Church Relations department, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

The spot where the remains were found appears to correspond to a site in a written description by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family’s killers, according to Pogorelov, an archaeologist at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg.

“An anthropologist has determined that the bones belong to two young individuals — a young male he found was aged roughly 10-13 and a young woman about 18-23,” he told NTV television by telephone.