No evidence Lenin ordered tsar's murder

A long-running probe investigating the murders of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family has found no proof linking Lenin to the killings, the chief investigator said Monday.

Historians and archivists have found no evidence that either the Bolshevik leader or the regional official Yakov Sverdlov ordered the family to be shot in 1918, Vladimir Solovyov, Russia's chief investigator, told the Izvestia daily.

"I can say with full confidence that today there is no reliable document proving the instigation of Lenin or Sverdlov" in carrying out the killings, he said.

Russia closed a criminal probe into the murders Friday after the case was reopened last year on the request of the tsar's descendants, Solovyov said.

Descendants of the Romanov clan are trying to show their family were victims of political repression, for which investigators must find evidence that the killings were carried out on state orders, not extrajudicially.

Russia's Supreme Court recognized in October 2008 that Nicholas II and his family had been victims of political repression, but the prosecutor general later ordered the criminal investigation closed in 2009, saying too much time had passed.