Moscow, January 4, 2017
Abbot of Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Egorievsk has reported when the results of Church assessments in the criminal case of the deaths of the members of the Royal Family will be known. “We hope that, as the work is quite voluminous and the report will be quite large, somewhere in the end of the second quarter of the year we will be able to present the results: the investigators—to the investigative committee, and we—to the upcoming hierarchical council,” announced Bishop Tikhon, a member of the Church’s commission for studying the results of the examinations of the “Ekaterinburg Remains,” in an interview with Interfax.
As for whether or not the remains will be acknowledged as holy relics, according to him, “only the Bishop’s council will make the final conclusions.”
“Intense work is ongoing. They’re carrying out a genetic examination in the best laboratories in the world. They’re completing a very voluminous and highly interesting anthropological examination with fundamentally new data—I can’t yet say what. The institute of anthropology, criminologists, and anthropologists are all involved,” said the interviewee. “It’s an historical examination involving our leading historian-archivists, and criminological experts.”
Bishop Tikhon called the new team of investigators in this criminal case “very professional.” “They have already uncovered several interesting, and fundamentally important things. As the matter is not yet closed, we don’t have the right to disclose the details of the investigation,” he added.
