They were separated at birth and sold – they met through TikTok. According to a new count, there are 700 snow leopards in India

12-year-old Amy Khvitia watches her favorite TV show Georgia’s Got Talent. She rubs her eyes as a girl who looks like her starts dancing.

Amy’s mother’s phone keeps ringing. Friends want to know why Amy dances on TV under a different name. “Everyone has a doppelgänger,” answers the mother.

Seven years later, it is Ano, the girl from the casting show, who tracks down Amy and makes contact. She became aware of her doppelgänger through a TikTok video.

Amy rubs her eyes again. Instantly remembers the moment when the girl’s resemblance struck her.

Besides their similarity, the two discover that they have a lot in common. They like the same music, like to dance and suffered from a similar genetic disease. The more the two write together, the closer the question becomes:

The two discover that they were born in the same Kirtskhi maternity hospital in western Georgia, but their birthdays are several weeks apart. So they can’t be twins. Or is it?

It was only when they confronted their parents that they discovered they had been adopted as babies. The adoptive parents would not have known that they were twins, nor that the adoption was an illegal practice – even though they paid a lot of money for the children.

Child trafficking ring in Georgia

Amy searches online for her birth mother, with success. A young woman from Germany gets in touch. Her mother fell into a coma during childbirth at Kirtskhi Hospital in 2002. She was then told the twins had died.

DNA testing shows that the young woman is actually the twins’ sister. Despite some concerns that the birth mother might have sold her own children, Amy and Ano agreed to meet.

Amy found her sister through a Facebook group with more than 230,000 members, founded by Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze. Museridze was adopted herself and tells in a BBC documentary how she became aware of the illegal baby trade during the search for her biological mother. It is said that the trade flourished between the early 1950s and 2005.

However, an exact figure is impossible because many documents no longer exist. The parents – just like Amy and Ano’s mother – were told that their child had died. They were not allowed to say goodbye to the deceased baby.

According to Museridze, anyone who wanted to see it was only shown a photo of a dead child. The journalist assumes that people from all walks of life were involved in the trade at the time – from taxi drivers to corrupt officials.

In 2005, Georgia’s adoption law was tightened to combat possible human trafficking. In 2022, the Georgian government ordered an investigation into child trafficking.

Meanwhile, Tamuna Museridze is trying to take a number of cases to court to obtain more documents. She is still looking for her biological mother to unravel her own story, her own destiny.