Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 6, 1994 TAG: 9410060045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LONDON NOTE: BELOW LENGTH: Medium
Dr. Peter Gill said the tests showed that Anna Anderson Manahan was not related to the Russian royal family and could not have been the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who was killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Manahan, the most famous of several women who claimed to be Anastasia, died in Charlottesville in 1984.
``Anna Anderson could not be related to the Czar or Czarina,'' Gill told a news conference attended by the Czar's great-nephew, Prince Rostislav Romanov.
Genetic tests on Manahan's tissue showed she was not related to the ruling Romanov family and could not be Anastasia, he said.
``It's over,'' said the prince, a London banker. ``I never had a shadow of doubt. My father was raised with Anastasia, and this woman would never see him.''
Manahan claimed for more than 60 years that she was Anastasia and had survived the Bolshevik bullets that killed the rest of her family.
Critics have long charged that Manahan was really Franzisca Schanzkowska, a woman of Polish-German descent.
Gill, a scientist with the Home Office's Forensic Science Service, said DNA tests showed Manahan's gene profiles exactly matched those of Carl Maucher, Schanzkowska's great-nephew.
Gill compared the tissue from the royal family with samples from the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, where they were preserved after Manahan had intestinal surgery in 1979. The tests were commissioned by Richard Schweitzer and his wife, Marina, granddaughter of the Czar's physician, who was killed with the family. Marina Schweitzer has supported Manahan's claim.
by CNB