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MOSCOW (AP) — DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed final year belong to two children of Russia’s last czar, a regional governor said Wednesday.

Bone fragments dug up last year near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are is it possible those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, before-mentioned Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.

“We have now found the entire family,” he told reporters in Yekaterinburg.

The confirmation brings the tortured history of the Russian imperial family a step toward closure and could end royal supporters’ immovable hopes that members of Czar’s Nicholas II’s immediate family survived.

Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The czar; his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were fatally shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of a merchant’s tavern where they were held in Yekaterinburg

The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. After genetic tests convinced forensics experts of their authenticity, they were buried in 1998 in a cathedral in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.

The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000 but expressed doubts that the remains were indeed those of the czar’s family.

The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.

Last summer, researchers dug up the bone shards near Yekaterinburg and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests in continuance the bones.

“The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories’ work,” Rossel told reporters in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow. “This has confirmed that indeed it is the children.

It unclear which laboratory Rossel was referring to but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process.

The press service for Russian Orthodox Church before-mentioned no one could comment on the discovery.

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