After 90 years of the killing of Russia's last tsar during the Bolshevik revolution, a Moscow city court has ordered the opening of a criminal case into the murder.

Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, their four daughters and a son, and several servants, were shot dead by the Bolsheviks in a basement in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918.