Anna and Irina, the two girls switched at birth.
It’s one of the weirdest child-swap accidents I’ve ever seen. When Yuliya Belyaeva was getting divorced from her husband, he refused to pay for his daughter because, as he said, she didn’t look like him. Irina Belyaeva, with her dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, doesn’t exactly look like her mother or her father, so the court did a DNA test. As it turns out, Irina wasn’t the daughter of the people she believed were her parents; in fact, Irina was switched at birth with a girl named Anna being raised by Naimat Iskanderov. But don’t worry, the Iskanderov and Belyaeva families have both been awarded $100,000 by the place that accidentally switched their children at birth.
“The money just can’t ease the pain,” said Ms. Belyaeva after the decision was handed down in a courtroom in Kopeisk, Russia, in the Ural Mountains. “All the money in the world isn’t worth a child’s look at mother … there are moments when I think it would have been better if I hadn’t known anything about that.”
Indeed. While the two families are making plans to move closer to one another in an attempt to allow their daughters to bond with their birth parents, the two girls, now 12, don’t want to leave the parents who raised them. The families either plan on sharing a house or buying two houses close together to raise their children jointly.
Tags: Yuliya Belyaeva, Naimat Iskanderov, Anna, Irina, children swapped at birth, mistakes, children swapped at birth get cash pay-out, unusual lawsuits, children switched at birth, families whose children were switched at birth get 0000 pay-off, Kopeisk, Russia
