MOSCOW (AP) – The Russian Orthodox church said Wednesday that Japanese researchers had confirmed its doubts about the authenticity of the remains of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II.

The church has long had questions about the remains of Nicholas, his family and servants – most of whom were buried in 1998 in a grand ceremony after years of elaborate DNA and other tests that scientists said proved their authenticity conclusively.

The church said the conclusions contradicted Russian, American and British scientists’ findings.

The church’s head, Patriarch Alexy II, snubbed the official ceremony held at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral and instead held his own at a town just north of Moscow.

In a statement, the patriarch’s press office said Tatsyo Nagai, director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Science at Japan’s Kitazato University, found that DNA in bone fragments from the remains of Nicholas’ nephew along with sweat and blood samples from Nicholas himself did not match in repeated tests.

“In the absence of indisputable proof … in order to spare Orthodox believers from temptation and division, the Russian Orthodox Church refrains from final judgment regarding the characteristics of the so-called Yekaterinburg remains,” the church statement said.

Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained.

In April 1918, they were sent to the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg, where a firing squad shot them to death three months later in the basement of a merchant’s house. The building, called the Ipatyev House, was demolished in 1977 on orders from Boris Yeltsin, who at the time was the region’s top Communist Party official and later became Russia’s first president.

The remains of the royal family were unearthed from a mining pit near Yekaterinburg in 1991.

Nicholas and his family were canonized by the church in 2000, after years of debate on the issue following the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.


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