Elene Deisadze was scrolling on TikTok in 2022 when she had to do a double-take. There was a girl who looked just like her.
The European teen immediately reached out to Anna Panchulidze, who she believed to be her doppelgänger. The two had an instant connection.
But it turned out the pair had more than a bond — they had shared DNA.
After several months of getting to know each other online, the two discovered that they were adopted.
“I had a happy childhood, but now my entire past felt like a deception,” Anna told AFP, according to the Daily Mail.
Once they realized that they didn’t actually know their biological family, the girls decided to take a DNA test and learned that they weren’t doppelgängers — they’re identical twins.
“We became friends without suspecting we might be sisters, but both of us felt there was some special bond between us,” Elene told AFP.
And while the girls’ revelation might be shocking, it’s unfortunately more common and dark than either had expected.
The DNA test for Elene and Anna was arranged with the help of Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze, who has been investigating a country-wide kidnapping scheme that appears to have taken place for decades between 1950 and 2006.
Museridze first uncovered the dibacle in 2016 when she found she had two birth certificates with different dates while she was clearing out her mother’s house after she died.
“We found out it was systemic, and we found out there are more than 100,000 children stolen in Georgia’s hospitals,” Museridze told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Through her investigation, she learned that the scheme was run by organized criminals who recruited a wide range of accomplices, including doctors and government officials.
Often times, hosptial staff would lie to parents telling them their children died at birth and then pass them off to be sold to families who did not realize their new children were kidnapped.
Ana’s mother, Patmani Parkosadze, confirmed she paid thousands of dollars — enough to buy a small apartment in Georgia at the time — to adopt her in 2005 after waiting years to adopt a child.
“I had no clue. At that time, you had to wait ages to adopt somebody. My husband and I were personally waiting for six years before we got Ana,” Parkosadze told the ABC.
“We really had no idea about the corrupt system … and I wouldn’t even imagine such a thing.”
Elene’s adoptive mother, Lia Korkotadze, told AFP that “adopting from an orphanage seemed virtually impossible due to incredibly long waiting lists.”
She was overjoyed when she heard about a six-month-old baby available for adoption from a local hospital for a fee.
“They brought Elene right to my house,” Korkotadze said, never suspecting there was “anything illegal.”
Anna and Elene are grateful for the families that raised them and to have found each other, but they still hope to be reunited with their biological parents.
“Maybe they don’t even know we exist because when children were adopted sometimes their biological parents were lied to, [told] your child is dead, maybe our parents think we are dead, we are not even alive, it would be so great to find them and tell them the truth,” Elene told ABC.
To help deceived families find each other, Museridze started a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting babies stolen from their parents — it currently has around 250,000 members and has reunited around 700 families.
The reporter has also teamed up with human rights lawyer Lia Mukhashavria to further investigate the national, decades-long scam.
“It was pretty clear it was well-structured illegal business in this country,” Museridze insisted.
Sadly, this isn’t the only country to be accused of a long-running child trafficking scheme.
It is estimated that nearly 8,000 to 12,000 children were illegally or forcibly adopted in Chile in the 1970s and ’80s during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, attorney, Anthony Clarkson, told Houston’s KPRC.
Forced adoptions took place before Pinochet came to power, but increased significantly under his regime as the dictator saw the adoptions as a brutal means of eliminating poverty and controlling population growth — Cristina Prisco, of the Bronx, was one of those children.
“Finding out the way I did was a bit shocking, but I’m happy I now know the real story and am a little angry at everything that my mother went through,” she previously told The Post.
“The people involved were evil people and they robbed me of my family.”
