DNA Dispute Revives Russian Royal Mystery

[Tami]

DNA Dispute Revives Russian Royal Mystery
Roger Highfield
The Sunday Telegraph, UK

LONDON-The fate of the Russian royal family was plunged into renewed controversy Sunday 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 British Home Office forensic scientists.

Dr. Peter Gill and his team at Britain\'s Forensic Science Service used genetic testing with the help of five cubic centimetres of blood from Britain\'s 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 Czar Nicholas II and members of his family.

The remains were brought to Britain by Dr. Pavel Ivanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Gill concluded that there was almost a 99% probability that five of the nine skeletons were those of the Czar, Czarina 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 Russian royal family.\"

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 Czarina Alexandra, one of the 1918 victims. Crucially, tests on the finger failed to match the Czarina\'s DNA reported by Gill.

Knight argues that the British 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,\" Knight said, citing strong evidence that the bone samples were tarnished with fresh, less-degraded DNA.

Knight said: \"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 as 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.\"


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Personally, I am beginning to the think the Bolsheviks started one of the greatest deceptions of the century, and the royal family was never really executed. I base this just on little puzzle pieces and from the amount of research & reading I\'ve done about the Romanovs and the events leading up to their supposed execution and events afterwards-such as Boris Yeltsin, who was a young army officer in Yekaterinburg in 1918; in the 1970\'s as leader of Russia, he had the house in Yekaterinburg destroyed. The government\'s public reason was because too many people were going there to visit & pay homage to the dead royal family. In my opinion, what better way to destroy a whole lot of forensic evidence in one go?

What do you think about this?