Members of a church commission investigating the 1918 shooting of Tsar Nicholas II and his family claim that the last tsar of Russia was murdered in a ritual killing.

Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, was put under house arrest after renouncing the throne in 1917. He was shot together with his wife and five children on July 17, 1918, in the cellar of a merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg.

Russian investigators reopened the probe into the century-old murder in 2015, even though the Bolsheviks believed to have shot the Romanov family were no longer living.

