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Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania, identical twins (pictured above), were separated from their mother and sold to different families shortly after birth.

It wasn’t until years later, through a fortuitous encounter via a TV talent show and a TikTok video, that they stumbled upon each other.

As they explored their history, they uncovered a disturbing truth – they were part of a larger group of babies in Georgia who had been abducted from hospitals and trafficked, with incidents extending as recently as 2005.

Now, the quest for answers intensifies, notes the BBC.

The story of how Amy and Ano discovered each other starts when they were 12. Amy Khvitia was at her godmother’s house near the Black Sea watching her favourite TV programme, Georgia’s Got Talent, when she noticed a girl dancing who looked uncannily similar to herself.

Seven years later, Ano was sent a TikTok video by a friend in November 2021, showing a girl who looked exactly like her with blue hair getting her eyebrow pierced.

Ano began trying to trace Amy, through Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats, and eventually, they found each other: “I have been looking for you for so long!” Amy messaged. “Me too,” replied Ano.

 

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Over the next few days, they discovered they had a lot in common, but not all of it made sense.

“Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger,” says Amy.

The mystery was unravelled after chatting with their families and putting the found pieces together. It turns out they had been adopted, separately, a few weeks apart in 2002.

Unable to have children, Amy’s mother says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. She would need to pay the doctors but she could take her home and raise her as her own.

Ano’s mother was told the same story.

Neither of the adoptive families knew the girls were twins and despite paying a lot of money to adopt their daughters, they say they hadn’t realised it was illegal. Georgia was going through a period of turmoil and as hospital staff were involved they thought it was legitimate.

The twins began wondering if their biological parents had sold them for profit, but when they stumbled upon a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting Georgian families with children suspected to have been illegally adopted at birth, they found their biological mother:

A young woman in Germany replied, saying her mother had given birth to twin girls in Kirtskhi Maternity Hospital in 2002 and that despite being told they had died, she now had some doubts.

DNA tests revealed that the girl from the Facebook group was their sister, and was living with their birth mother, Aza, in Germany.

This is where the story becomes much bigger:

The Facebook group the twins had used, Vedzeb, means “I’m searching” in Georgian. It has countless posts from mothers who say hospital staff told them their babies had died, but later discovered the deaths weren’t recorded and their children could still be alive.

The group has more than 230,000 members and, along with access to DNA websites, has blown wide open a dark chapter in Georgia’s history.

Journalist Tamuna Museridze set up the group in 2021 after she discovered she was adopted, and while this has helped to reunite hundreds of families, she has not yet tracked down her own.

Tamuna found that this black market in adoption stretched across Georgia and went on from the early 1970s to 2006. She contends that the operation was orchestrated by organised criminals, encompassing individuals from various walks of life, including taxi drivers and individuals in high-ranking government positions. Corrupt officials were responsible for fabricating the necessary documents to facilitate the illicit adoption processes.

“The scale is unimaginable, up to 100,000 babies were stolen. It was systemic,” she says.

Read more about the personal stories of the families affected by this dark web of baby trafficking over at the BBC. One woman was given a suitcase of sticks by the doctor and told they were her baby’s remains and that she should bury it and never look inside.

[source:bbc]