THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Two Russian families are suing their local maternity hospital for "moral trauma" after learning that they were given the wrong babies 12 years ago due to an error by midwives.
The families learnt of the mix-up by chance after the husband of one of the women divorced her and then refused to pay maintenance for their daughter, saying she looked nothing like him.
To everyone's astonishment, a DNA test proved that the angry husband was right and that 12-year-old Irina Belyaeva was not biologically related to her parents, Yuri and Yuliya Belyaeva.
An investigation revealed that Irina was instead the biological daughter of a local Muslim family and that the other family's daughter, Anya, was the biological daughter of Yuri and Yuliya.
It transpired that the two children had been born within 15 minutes of each other in the same ward in 1998 but that the midwives had mixed up their wrist-tags, possibly because the two mothers were listed under their maiden names which both began with the letter A.
Both families affected live in a mining community in Russia's Chelyabinsk region. » | Andrew Osborn, Moscow | Tuesday, October 11, 2011
